All That’s Ever Been Known.

Once as a dusk entombed me,

Hope grew hoarse, and shadows doomed me.

In a house where forces groomed me

I thought of thoughts I dared not speak.

Each wall was lined with disheveled dreams

Scars from storms I ought never to have seen.

Time – that ghostly, grinding wheel,

Carved new cracks in every week.

All the while, the world kept turning;

Soulless, ruthless, shameless, bleak

.

Not a pause, no peace, no pardon.

Just the march through fate’s hard garden,

Where the flowers bloom in burden,

Heavy-headed, red with ache.

Childhood myths sung of glory,

Promised arc and upward story,

But the facts are more grim and gory.

They spoke of hearts that are fake, then break.

“Smile,” Truth whispered, “keep on smiling,

learn to sing in your own earthquake.”

.

There’s no balm for bones gone brittle,

No reprieve, no grace, no riddle.

Just the pounding of the middle,

As dreams begin to fade.

I have danced through rooms of sorrow,

Begged a dawn that stole tomorrow,

Worn a grin I’d learned to borrow

From a mask I never made.

Still I moved, though cracked and crumbling,

and still – I stayed.

.

Oh – the nerve of clocks unceasing,

Every second’s blade releasing,

Never pausing, never easing,

Mocking sigh and silent screaming.

Like a tide that’s blind and ruthless,

Life pressed, I watched on, clueless. 

Dragged through days uncouth and mean

less ‘Golden Age’ more rusted dreams. 

Yet within that grief-born furnace,

Flickered gleams. 

Not of hope, so cleanly spoken,

But of grit when flesh is broken.

Of the soul’s uncheated token,

Of the will that won’t rescind or bend

From the ash of calm forsaken,

From the nights when I’d awaken

Gasping, shattered, weak, mistaken

There rose a force I couldn’t fend

Not a roar, but soft persistence to:

“Just ascend.”

.

Now I walk with ghosts beside me,

Wounds that whisper and try to guide me,

beneath a sky that cannot hide me

From the truth I now inhale:

We endure not by redemption,

Nor by fate’s delayed exemption,

But by quiet, grim intention.

By the vow we will not fail.

Though the world may never love us,

We prevail.

.

So, when midnight grief comes knocking,

When your inner tide is rocking,

When the voice of death is mocking

All the strength you pretend to own.

Stand, if only just to shudder.

Step, though every joint may mutter.

There is meaning in the stutter

Of a heart that walks alone.

You are more than pain or silence.

You are all that’s ever been known.