Silently I Go

Words tremble and form on my lips,
outside in the middle of nowhere
on an old, abandoned field’s
icy, quiet calm – I can
see those words as frosted air
almost palpable, almost real.
Almost.
The memory of an ecstasy
ripples vehemently in rifts,
saying, ‘don’t let go –
don’t let go of the moment,
the tenderness and the journey
that has begun –
don’t let go of the time invested
and the heart’s own life span,’ –
I clap my mitts together hard,
I need to hear another voice
in the heavy, thick dullness
of meaningless, inside this bitterly
cold wilderness – an expansion
of existence.
Inside this perfect ring of O,
caution and doubt is excluded
by the wintry tourniquet
and deep seated bleakness.
Within this rink of fire
I have found a plan,
idly scraped into the dense snow’s
virgin white territory
of thoughts and decision making –
a bittersweet means to an end.
I exhale and words reverberate –
detached,
let loose, they do their own thing.
I believe that trust is its own reward,
and love is a consequence
of that very airing –
so I let them breathe.
Lips tremble with more words,
although I can’t hear them,
the cold lets them sit there.
Sat on the snow, memories
cosy up to them
of when tears made me choke
and lies made me half blind –
now they both
thaw like a discarded
ice lolly bleeding into the impacted
prisms hidden in this pristine
foundation.
I rub my insulated woollen hand
over a small pond’s glass
to see a lifetime spent asking
why amid my mind’s sighs to half
answered questions and doubts,
and painful shouts from inertia.
I find a heavy rock and listening
only to the whispers between
my thighs’ nylon energy,
I smash it into a face
in the ice –
all those things are finally
free to surface through the shards
of their confinement –
roaming prisoners are cut loose
to set me free,
to crawl out onto the debris.
Wading knee deep I try to remember
what was instilled in me;
I was taught to swim and love,
and trust in rewards,
I was loved and I am loved,
a consequence of not sinking –
swim freely.
The temperature plummets
within, and still knee deep, I am caught
in the ice of limbo
like a reluctant, unbaptised infant
who already knows its own mind.
Today it is not as simple, revisited
once again, by dark clouds that come
to smother me with their words –
they take their place in the queue
in this time lapse of a snowy day
where whiter clouds come and go,
but like my words they are seldom
realised, and so I have to withdraw
into a quiet blackness – the Narnia sheen
of glistening reason is too bright,
too stark, too vivid when shouts scream
from it.
The pool of unhurried water is a starkly
black dilation –
of a welcoming eye – the pupil inside
this giant O.
I fall into its gaze, and like yours
it swallows me up.

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