Not courage

Danger signalled

as the thought coalesced,

clotting its stickiness

into the fixity

of scabby intention.

Not courage:

maybe untethers daring

lasso-ing wildly

out and down and up:

arrogance unfurled.

Then forgotten

but still somehow seeking

while hours stretched into days

into weeks and then

the camouflage of amnesia.

Then pain delivered:

unbounded, unended

imperative in its demands.

A slavery, an apprenticeship,

a baptism, a devotion performed.

Not courage:

maybe a caged terror

battering wildly

out and down and up:

existence unsprung.

Under the glare

Safe in the sands

blanketed in the sterility

of desiccated life

I lay myself out

on the plains of pain.

So many have died here

for want of a single ....

for want of what?

Why do we come here to die,

to be bleached out,

scourged and seared,

by the unyielding glare?

I know why I came:

I came to die.

To kill myself created,

to cauterise the wounds

inflicted by an untrue,

distant self.

Have I died here?

for want of a single ...

for want of what?

I wait for me own

forgiveness

so that compassion

might flow somehow.

Burnout

Burnout: exhaustion

cynicism

feeling of reduced ability

And they have co-opted even that:

burn-out velvet

burn-out fabric

The theft of language

It would be different

if we had carefully

placed our

words

wrapped in swaddling

in the bullrushes

for someone with

hopefully better prospects

to discover and

protect

Instead words have been

slowly stripped from

us leaving us

first without

the clothes of sharing

then without the

undergarments

of transmission

and finally without

the flesh of

meaning

And now all we have left

are the hollow skeletons

of empty form

sketching a

once-living

but now

arti-factual assortment

of bones.