This Path

This poem only available on Lush Stories. If you are reading it elsewhere, it has been stolen.

The golden glory of the sun is just a distant memory now.
I traverse this waking nightmare
Under the celestial gaze of a billion starry watchers,
They who glitter in my tears with icy blue-white sanction
As I lift my face for hostile acknowledgement of my failings.
The path I’ve trodden through these ugly years remains the same;
Always another corner;
Always another dead dream around the bend in this lonely road.
This forest surrounds me incessantly;
These trees of writhing bodies,
Naked and lithe and soaked in the lusty waters
Of a Lovers’ Moon,
The rippling of their flesh sliding down the ages
Even as I slide in the mud of this cursed wandering.
The rustling of paper hearts,
Those flighty birds, chatter and squawk,
And the river of their beloved laughter bends its way
Alongside my footsteps,
Constantly mocking the trudge
And the wearied slump of my shoulders.
The dark forest greens with their earthy, deep smells
Smear the way through with rich, musky spices
That I can almost touch with my fingers.
This fragrant pine mist that fingers my hair
And tugs on my skirt
Crawls its giggling way into my ears,
Ringing and singing in revolted glee at my ugliness.
“Somebody waits for you,”
The reviling phantoms whisper,
Clawing and tearing fresh rips in that
Mutilated bloody mess that the forest limbs crushed in one,
Ugly, stinking, hating vice.
What have I left, but kindly pats on the hand
From a few passers-by who unknowingly stumble
Into this realm of tortured, freakish cruel pain?
I have nothing but the satin kindness that slides off me
With the well-meaning, but unknowing, words.
They fall desiccated at my feet because such dreams die
When they touch my disgusting disgrace.
And the passers-by pass,
Taking their remaining, kindly, living dreams with them,
And leaving me in their wake with the dead.
Hope flutters a broken feather;
The only one she has left.
I wish the dark forest beasts would devour her savaged form
And put an end to this misery,
That I may traverse this dark path in hollow peace.

This poem only available on Lush Stories. If you are reading it elsewhere, it has been stolen.