Despair

Drifting by as slow as eternity until they are gone before realization sets in.  One after another they come and go bearing gifts of pleasure and pain upon tendriled hands that move like a mist.  As you breath to live, it enters your lungs and swirls before seeping into your blood.  It rides the life flow to your brain and fills your mind with images to make you smile and cry.  Visions in a blackness quietly breeding emotions and attempting to seize control of you with an onslaught of confusion like a bursting sack of tiny spiders.  Joy, sadness, anger, compassion, strength, and fear a dozen times over swarm around you as you sit alone in a shadow.  Love is your salvation, hate is your undoing, loneliness is your keeper, and despair is it's master.  Despair wants the slow death of your soul.  It comes as a thick, black, fleshy mass that wants to see your empty eyes sink into its boggy mire.  Despair would have you as its own, but control is where you give it, and you do not relinquish it so easily.  You do not run.  You do not cower.  You stand and paralyze it with a piercing stare.  With faith as your armor and hope as your blade, you take it.  Clutch it.  Embrace it.  Slice it open, and watch it bleed.  Reach into its gaping wound, and grasp its cold and numbing entrails.  Lick its icy blood from your fingertips while looking it in the eye.  Walk into its boggy mire until you disappear, and then walk out again laughing.  Despair is yours to do with as you wish.  Visit it, talk about it, be inspired by it, use it, but never ignore it. You are still in the care of its servant.  Loneliness watches over you until love finds you.Boy am I weary of bitter, venomous, angst-ridden poems. I'm all for expressing oneself in poetry- venting through the written word, delving into ones own soul. And better the venting be done with a pen than with a gun or some other tool of destruction. But come on. Angst is preferring to complain about your problems rather than actually trying to solve them. Angst is for the weak. Written May 5th, 1997 © on Feb 27 2002 02:48 AM PST   18 • 0 • 1