Oh, language, why have you left me and tongue why have you forsaken me? The waters of my mouth are as a rock. My words are a fountain that no longer runs 5 the clouds of my eye are dry. The fields of my being are burnt to stalks, their verdure lies shocked and degraded. I am shucked and hollow only now. That which flowed through me is now fled. 10 Cisterns in my lungs deep with bowls of meaning lie emptied and shattered; they are dead. My soul has walked under the eves of despair and stepped into a shadowy place. The shapes that beheld my hands 15 now are fled as in a broken dream; chance sentences and meaningless accents appall the day worse then the most wretched silence. The new time of the morning no longer glorifies me, afternoons are hot, confused with musings; 20 I am no more a thing to myself without you, o song! a dead man wrapped in today's living, a whisper that cannot hear itself. Time indulges the spectacle, space adheres; temptation that once so strongly bade me onward 25 like new dress laid out before me folds soiled and dusty before my sense. Chance and disaster, my twins, bring nothing, are bright in nothing, come to nothing; they are sold and dead, unmournable whores. 30 The mountain from which I saw myself, and perceived love, as doves perceive it in the tilled field, the open homes quaint with chimney smoke, is flattened and ashes now. I am nothing and nowhere a traveler with no goal for his feet, 35 a melody without purpose, hissed to a screech, an arrow without target or trueline-- misery without meaning, despite double sadness, a low moment stubbornly remembered, without reason, without fixtures, like an old scald.
From the collection "Naked Eloquence"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.