Bereft - Fen

Alone…

Hollow…

Ashen

Life promises only death

And thus I am again sentenced to solitude

In silent contemplation, a vision framed in grey

Falls upon world-weary eyes and brings torpor

The years behind left drained and colourless

I look within to fan the embers

Charred and enervated beyond recall to flame

For so long, I have journeyed, one weary step upon another

The dust of a decade’s failures ground underfoot

And so I fix my gaze to myriad desolation

The harsh wind punished a frail simulacra

On the precipice of spiritual oblivion

Without and within only ashes remain

As the elements now I shall be

As one with the enduring stone and the onrishing waters of wild rivers

As one with the burnished hue of the dawn

And the misty closure of the twilit evenfall

To cross the foils and stygian peatfields

To stride unfeeling towards the eternal periphery

These bitter lands have borne witness to so much

That I now embrace within a lonely

And burned-out will

When only distant memories chime across a spiritual vacuum

The last vestiges of life long since extinguished

A dying visage whipped by storms charged with the stench of despair

The entirety of my essence, the nucleus of my humanity now scoured

I am Bereft