As I walk the haunted plains
and the graveyard within myself,
I admire the bones I've buried
beneath the empire that I have built,
So rotten that the stench of them
permeates my skin of stone,
Forgotten that they once had bled
facing my monsters all alone.
And while I sink into inscriptions
on the plaques above the graves,
I remember every word that's hung
to my tongue tied to my pain.
Like a lingering memorial
of self-perpetual regret,
I'm a hymn, a prayer,
a temple of contemplation,
where the living wish they were dead.
For the sky has smeared its oily fingers
over this flaking scab of land,
where withered trees of souls that sway
to a sea of damnated hands,
are desperate for deliverance
from the legacy that locks them in...
They've survived and been the fittest
but they will never feel again.
And gushing out the rivers
are their whispers of sweet remorse,
From a throat slit by years
walking the teeth of a lonely shore.
Like cliffs of sheer resentment
plastered with molten thick offence,
It's easier to wander in the darkness
than to confront the consequence.
But as I pass the cracked foundations
of the beliefs that I once held,
I stumble across a man that's made
splinters from the gates of hell,
Who with steps laid out in lashes,
and breathes enlaced in dust,
has raised me from out my ashes
and saved me with his unfailing love.
And as my heart of concrete shatters
I am ripped from a crumbling spine,
A skeleton shedding new flesh inside,
now growing like a garden of life,
Watered in the tears of angels,
and planted to be salt of the earth,
I blossom in the pain of my burdens,
and I brighten on the days I get burnt.
Because hope like a seed has sprouted
through the beak of a ravens laugh,
That's picked and untwisted my bitterness
like the surgical blades in the grass,
Then stitched up in ribbons of sunlight,
re-synthesized beneath six feet of clay,
Every monotone fragment of my life
shapes mosaic trees of unshakeable grace.
And I ask,
Does the dandelion dance or cower
in fear of facing the wild unknown?
Or the carnation doubt her grand design
before she's fully grown?
Does a rose withhold her beauty,
to spite her jealous step-sister thorns?
No! she goes to the ball in a glamourous gown
and only bows to the battles she's fought.
As I now escape from my ravenous coffin
once sealed by the decay of my mind,
I am no longer a slave to my failures
as water is no more a servant to wine,
Dripping down the eyes of a lion,
but savoured on the lips of a lamb,
Life returns to my valley of sorrow
as bones rebuild this ghost of a man.
© 2022 Greg Megaw | Awakened Arts