A Dream's Clutch (Poem - Shadow Series: Parts III and IV)

Part III

I fell in love with the ability to know

to understand profound.

I traveled to mountain sky-tops

that brushed clouds shaped like smashed blueberries,

I wandered cobblestone streets made like disjointed finger-bones

where gaslights guided their fitful flames into black evenings

soaking up any mirth in my veins.

I flew over roughshod oceans

tempestuous like a mare's mane and heady like a woman's spirit

yet found nothing that could define the ability to know.

Sensing my saga barely begun

I turned to my shadow, that irksome companion,

and asked him what he knew.

His laugh was like metal being scraped across pebbles

and I fled his presence fearing my imminent incapacitation.

Humbled and harried, I hurtled myself upon a jet-stream of depression

hoping my answer lay inside that inky, slick meandering wind.

Instead, I lost my way for two years inside that mess,

while my arms stretched out the bars of my prison like inmates scraping for freedom,

reaching for anything familiar.

Whispers inside that wind told me I was worthless,

they spooked my nightmares into believing they were nothing

and those wispy winds turned down the color of my world.

I had scraped my nails to blood by building that steely structure

of my self-esteem,

and at last a loose laughter floated up into my purgatory.

The sticky winds screamed their fell voices

and in that moment I escaped, pulled through my bars by a smile,

a smile that without a doubt knew who I was,

and not what I was, with skin shredded like a frayed ribbon around dead flowers.

Seeing the end of my saga in those eyes, the color of Sienna dirt

rise up and take my trembling hand,

I followed lovingly, floating,

coming to a rest at those same sky-tops where my journey to know began.

My knees buckled under a profound sadness,

yet my eyes laughed loudly as though my body,

disintegrating like sand through a sift, weren't disappearing into the unknown.

 Part IV

I'd recently ended a week,
one much darker than most,
soaked in tremulous visions most would want to forget,
my mind a labyrinth of troubled butterflies
with wet wings and too much space
yet no exit -
when
one evening I sat on a cliff of sadness holding my shadow's hand.
Serene and motionless
my shadow ran its darkness around my fingertips
slowly
lacing a dangerous caress
its two pale eyes hooded as full moons behind charcoal clouds
staring blink-less at endless questions
perched midair within a grasp at the edge of my cliff.


"Go ahead," I mumbled softly.


And when at last it had its fill,
my neck a drained story,
I asked my sinister smiling shadow,
"what kept you so long?"
as I hung suspended for a beautiful moment
above tar black darkness,
my butterfly wings at last free to flee,
slicing shadow from me
moon from cloud.