As My Blindness Burns. A Poem by Allison Grayhurst

 
Without these things
of rainbow and insight
I stand, fragmented
by despair, fleeting as daylight,
composed of failed hopes
and held-back tears.
 
Young, like truth is
when first found,
are the swollen joys
of new understandings.
And secret still is
the unsculpted future
that rises unexpected without
resolution.
 
The muses of this universe hold faith
and doubt equally
in their impregnated beams,
and me with my hideous cowardice
that grows stronger with age, hides
the things that challenge
and direct me to an edge, ignoring the
simple surrender needed
to grow and to deeply be
someone.
 
This city sobs
when hearing its own wind die,
takes in its industrious hands
the sluggish and the bitter.
 
And the few who rebuke
this smog-breathing serpent
lean depleted in each other’s arms,
hoping to embody something beyond
the world or melancholic pain.
 
And here, wanting, each slave is born, each
mistrust upheld like a perfected attitude.
 
People hold conviction without vision,
walking the subway floors, staring
out to empty highways.
Stale are the nutrients of each wished-on star.
Stale ambition bleating into
each small ear.
 
Lament now the corpses in caverns,
in parades and family restaurants.
Lament the eclipsed beauty of impulse,
the restraint of every compelling break-a-way.
 
For just one hope to tread behind
Jesus’ sandal, freeze,
then crack all chains.
 
I would delight
in the struggles of individuals
conquering the downcast clouds
that hinder and fill a soul
with stagnant woe.
 
But like I am, sick with human
needs, political and ungenerous, I face
the storms and hide my pleas inside the
thunder.
 
Naked, lovers divulge
their infinite shades. Lovers
lean like dried up trees against
an autumn’s ground, lean
for mercy and for each
affection denied.
 
But love they do
in the wintry airs
trying to overcome
personality, embedded habits,
each other’s foreign sphere.
 
I am pale, forgetful,
I lie awake all night taken down,
breathing the vaporous stench of
decay, in nightmares,
while kneeling before
the brightest flower.
 
I watch you thinning,
keeping
my anguish private,
for none will accept my five open
senses, the reasons for my withered will.
 
I cannot embrace my interior
with humble affection, but must
know the labyrinth’s breathing tide;
mysteries renounced, complexities explained
by pensive reason.
 
Where I sit, seeking the inaccessible cure,
madness comes to kill through dissection,
definition and spiritual systems decreed.
 
In water I am numb,
drifting dazed through dark
androgynous waves.
 
I think of whispering to your waiting grave,
of netting grief and memory,
starving each of their sustenance
blind.
 
But then alone, in death, in life,
connection is our bread,
our higher air that beckons and repairs
the cracks that would kill on
tougher days.
 
How long to hold you in this sandpit sinking?
How long to watch your unwilling heart fade?
 
That I am through with annihilating snares
Through with the brutes of cold consuming despair
 
Through your life yielding to
sudden disease, through the closed door
that echoes strong sighs like screams
down corridors of love’s
last stroke . . .
 
Longing for nether fields,
I want to run
in these subterranean, primal places, want
limbs of fire, eternally
red and dancing over the waking darkness.
I want to seal you
 
into the living Divine.
 
I am suspended, believing
the horror will not come, believing
death will not make
a skeleton out of you. 
 
 

 
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