Lost Soul
He came from nowhere, this stranger in the night
Standing there in the moonlight, he looked so lovely
With his night-dark hair and strange, colourless
eyes.
He stood there for a moment, as if this moment were
Frozen in time, stood staring at everything and seeing
nothing.
After that eternal moment had passed into oblivion,
There to be lost in time, he moved, going from moonbeam
To moonbeam; seeking something that was not to be
found.
7/11/01
Soul Within
All is blackness, all is silence, in this lonely world.
You have lost your way, lost your soul.
Slipping through the moonlight, keeping company with
shadows,
Little more than shadowed angel wings.
Look to see, listen to hear; find your soul.
Search the world, search forever; never dreaming
To look in the one place you fear most: within.
Look within and find your soul, Angel-mine.
7/19/01
I wrote Lost Soul in a Writing Camp a few
summers back, and then my friend Mary (whose site is http://sweetydog.tripod.com) drew a picture as an illustration for it. While she was inking it, I wrote Soul Within. The picture
never made it to publication, but Lost Soul did.
Golden Girl
She's a golden girl; she's got it all.
Everything's going her way and she's on top of the world.
She never thinks about the endless fall from Cloud Nine,
Because if she looks down, she's lost.
She's a silver girl, got that silver tongue
And the charm and wit to match.
She's amazing and talented, but the top is desperately lonely,
And she shines with reflected light.
She's a golden girl with a rich golden voice;
She's a silver girl distant as the silver moon.
And she never knows when it's all going to come crashing down
Around her like a Taj Mahal made of cards.
And she shines like gold and she shimmers like silver,
And wonders what she's missing; why is the top never enough?
When she gets there, the bar just moves higher:
Let's up the ante, Golden Girl, and see if you can top that.
And her fire burns cold and brilliant:
A distant star whose light
Could be extinguished
And the world would never know.
She's a golden girl, walking tall and proud.
She's a silver girl,
With silver tears making tracks
Down her face in the moonlight.
1/12/04
Memory and Sorrow
In these long-abandoned gardens,
Which possess a fey, overgrown beauty,
There are rumoured to walk ghosts.
The ghosts of children, perhaps,
Dead these eighteen years?
No, the ghosts that haunt these forgotten ruins
Are Sorrow--unbearable despair--and Memory--images of the past.
And Sorrow and Memory walk the grounds night and day.
Never are these gardens alone,
For they are traversed by Memory and Sorrow,
Two lovers throughout the ages,
Their presence a stark reminder of life's frailty.
These wild, overgrown regions,
Once so orderly, haunt the living
With their strange beauty
And stranger silence.
In this unnatural solitude,
The ghosts of Sorrow and Memory linger,
To remind the universe of what it has lost.
On Hallowed Ground
Clash of steel on steel, acrid stench of smoke
vision filled with blood and sparks that
Flare brightly, and, seconds later, fall to the
cold, slick earth, spent.
Sight fades
darkness surrounds
The sounds of battle ebb with an invisible tide
that will not be denied.
Stillness descends; heat leeches from fall forms
tht are sprawled on the muddied field, never to
Rise again
never to feel the spark of life.
Cold wind shrieks with the thousand voices of the damned
howling over silent remnants
Of chaos and destruction;
nature mourns the unnaturalness of humankind.
Far above the carnage, forces gather and thunder crashes in the darkness;
primordial spirits howl and shriek with rage
After each glimpse through lightning of the desecration
of their hallowed realms by warring forces of Man.
On the cold battlefield below, a dying spark is fanned
into white heat by hate; fires blaze among the dead,
Whose voices scream as they writhe in eternal agony
in a momentary inferno.
Wraiths, twisted forms,
faces frozen masks of agony and hate,
Rise from the plain slick with the lifeblood of thousands,
to do battle once more on hallowed ground.
And the wind slashes through their misty forms,
inflicting wounds of spirit upon the wraiths
Whose corporeal shells lie crumpled,
lifeless, beneath the feet of primordial spirits.
The fires of hate blaze hotter and hotter,
fueled by the rage of men denied rest,
Men dead upon this sacred battlefield,
who, with their blood, have consecrated this ground.
As the spectral hosts march onward, ghostly screams fade into the night,
and frozen silence descends upon the plain once more,
Broken only by the memories of those whose sparks no longer glow,
whose voices moan and shriek with the icy wind through the surreal death scene.
Not one of my happier pieces, needless to say.
