Tag: despair

“The Footbridge”

On By Mike U.In Poetry9 Comments

“The Footbridge”
(c) 2021 by Michael L. Utley

That derelict footbridge
Has finally failed
Stranding us on
Opposite shores
Of the abyss
Words
Like rotted planks
Litter the gorge
Below
Desires and dreams
Dashed
Upon indifferent rocks
Silence is all
I hear from you
Subdued echoes
Of regret
Perish
In opaque mists
Impenetrable
To starlight
And hope
The absence
Of closure
Rooting me
In place
Heart seized
By fear
And uncertainty
Did you turn
And walk away
Or did you
Plummet
Like our words
Into the
Sepulchral gulf
And must I
Remain here
Forever
Waiting for
The answer which will
Never come

“The Daisy Ring”

On By Mike U.In Poetry2 Comments

“The Daisy Ring”
(c) 2021 by Michael L. Utley

“I found thee in a faerie copse…”

“Hmm?” she murmured
Her gaze caught somewhere
In the rainy neon night-world
Beyond the coffee shop window
Her fingers weightless
Feather-like
In my hand
Ethereal
Furnace-hot

“I found thee in a faerie copse
Alighting on each flower fair
And as I ‘proached thee in the hopes
Of snaring thee in lovers’ ropes
Thou disappeared into thin air…”

She looked at me then
A faint smile teasing
Her lips
“Your poetry is terrible,” she said
Her tired eyes regarding me warmly
For a moment before
Returning to the
Pouring rain beyond
Our personal universe
Of rickety little table and
Untouched mocaccinos
Her brown eyes
Glistening
Misting
As she scanned the night
A single tear tracing
The curve of her cheekbone
In the garish glare of the
Outside world

I stared at her hand
Too pale and fragile
Almost transparent
As it nestled idly in mine
Like some sickly dove
The delicate silver band on her
Too-thin ivory finger
Etched with some flowing
Unknown script resembling a
Daisy chain
It was all I could do
Not to look at
The rest of her
But I did anyway
I had to
And it hurt

I closed my eyes
And allowed my
Memories of her
To replace the despairing image
Burned into my mind
As she sat in somber contemplation
On an unremarkable stormy night
In some nameless coffee shop
In an arbitrary world
Where prayers go unanswered
And hope dies on the vine
And nothing is what it seems

The image that settled
In my mind’s eye was
The first time I saw her
As I made my aimless way along
Some mindless city sidewalk
In some pointless other reality
Her face ensconced in a
Breeze-blown mane of
Luxuriant onyx hair
As she peered out the window
Of a passing bus
Looking at nothing
Lost in some reverie of her own
A faint bemused smile
Causing her face to glow
So brightly I had to
Look away or be blinded
And though she didn’t see me
I couldn’t stop seeing her
And was it fate that I eventually
Found her?
A miracle?
Random chance?
I chose fate
But I was wrong
I didn’t find her
She found me
And by that point
It was too late

I opened my eyes
And all pretense fled
Immediately

She was fading
Diminishing
Before my eyes
Her essence draining
As though her soul
Had been punctured
By some eldritch poisoned dart
She must have known
What I was thinking
(She always did)
And she looked at me
Out of anguished eyes
Drowning in
Dark forbidden pools
And squeezed my hand with
All of her might
Her grip so weak by now
So frail
“You can’t save me…”

I looked at her angrily
About to deny this lie
This horrible, god-awful lie

“No…” she whispered
She reached out and
Touched my cheek
And after a time
All my anger dissolved
Into shame
And ran down my face
She wiped away
My pathetic tears and
Placed her moistened hand
Back in mine
Her sterling daisy ring
Gleaming dully

“Tell me again,” she said
As she tried to smile
“Tell me again of how you found me…”

And I looked at her
A solemn, resigned calmness
Settling over me like
A sheet pulled over the face
Of the deceased
She knew it wasn’t true
She knew she’d chosen me
Not the other way around
And I’d been powerless to resist
But she indulged my silly-sad
Fantasies
Because she loved me
And because she loved my
Puerile poetry

I swallowed hard
Shut my eyes against
What was about to happen
And said

“I found thee in a faerie copse…”

Her hand began to tremble in mine

“Alighting on each flower fair…”

The din of the coffee shop quieted
As the subtle incense
Of pine and myrtle
Wafted delicately

“And as I ‘proached thee in the hopes…”

A distant, stifled sob lilted softly
In the silence amid
The nearly indiscernible cries
Of birdsong

“Of snaring thee in lovers’ ropes…”

Her hand pulled away from mine
As gently as a parting lover’s kiss

“Thou disappeared into thin air…”

There was an almost imperceptible sigh
Like a forlorn forest breeze

When I finally opened my eyes
Her burnished silver daisy ring was
All that was left of her

She was gone

“Sea of Trees”

On By Mike U.In Poetry9 Comments

“Sea of Trees”
(c) 2019 by Michael L. Utley

To slake my thirst
With dew from leaves that never see the light
Arboreal the tears that fall and quench
The darkest dreams

To fill my bowels
With loam whose cloying scent bespeaks of death
Arboreal the taste of living earth
My hunger begs

To see the gleam
‘Neath tenebrous shadows and rayless groves
Arboreal the blackest night in day
Below the boughs

To run rough hands
O’er scabrous bark and hardened boles and moss
Arboreal the pillars scrape the sky
In breezes weep

The silence holds
Forbidden knowledge
The silence holds
The universe
The silence holds
The truth

The path wends through
This living thing, this thing that sighs and cries
And dies and eats itself a cannibal
Whose roots betray sorrowful sentience
Whose trunks hold back the sky with anguished might
Whose limbs strain forth in melancholy pleas
A beckoning

A reckoning
The path into the gloom is just a path
With littered leaves and lichen on the rocks
And overhead the canopy to keep
The sky from falling down under the weight
Of lifetimes filled with torment and regret
It’s just a path

No need to fear
The forest welcomes me it knows my name
Envelops me in arms of somber green
It sings to me a song of silent peace
It pulls me down the path on wings of leaves
It whispers of a place where I may rest
And leads me there

There are others
Herein among the endless sea of trees
Herein among the caverns and the gulfs
Herein among the secrets and the cries
Which echo faintly in sepulchral voids
Herein where many come and none return
There are others

These are my kin
These shades that linger far beyond their time
And welcome me with soundless empty stares
And follow me along the darkling path
And shimmer as mirages in the air
And fade away as if they’d never been
Into the trees

The silence holds
Everything

Arboreal
My personal Aokigahara
My sea of trees my jade remembrance
There is a place just off the path ahead
A place of sodden leaves and broken twigs
And bitter cold that numbs away all pain
A resting place

I am not that boy who saw the sun
I have never seen the sun nor shall
I see only trees

“The Golden Door”

On By Mike U.In PoetryLeave a comment

“The Golden Door”
(c) 2017 by Michael L. Utley

The golden door is caked with blood
A patinated crimson tracery
Its gilded crest a filigree
Of ruined hope

There is a sense of something there
Beyond this barrier intransigent
A light a balm a restful place
But not for me

What lies beyond is out of reach
No matter how I pound my broken fists
Upon that door immutable
I can’t get in

My voice grown hoarse, I cannot call
Aloud, my screams which echoed through the years
Are silenced now, a whispered wheeze
Is all that’s left

The gulf that separates two shores
Impassable, impossible; a leap
Too great for wretched mortal minds
And riven souls

What have I ever done to earn
The wrath of all creation? Even stars
That light the velvet void grow dim
Regarding me

With pale scornful eyes, the moon
A frigid face inscrutable, its gaze
A blazing condemnation of
My life’s disgrace

And still I stand at golden door
With bleeding hands balled into angry fists
And pound away as stinging tears
Burn blinded eyes

In futile faith that things will change
Before I can no longer will myself
To fight this fruitless battle and
Abandon hope

That something better lies beyond
The golden door

“The Thing on the Corner”

On By Mike U.In PoetryLeave a comment

“The Thing on the Corner”
© 2013 by Michael L. Utley

The thing on the corner
That squalid revenant
That only I could see
As my daily peregrination
Took me through the city
Past vulgar monuments
To capitalism and greed
Through roiling seas of
Soulless apathetic drones
The mindless rhythm of
Humanity
The ebb and flow of futility

The thing on the corner
That filthy phantom
That caught my eye
And no one else’s
A sort of uncanny gravity
About him
That caused my pace to slacken
As if I were being lured into
Some kind of anomalous orbit
Around this peculiar specter
Just a tug and then I was free
To continue along my way
In my daylight world of
Noise and glare and stench

The thing on the corner
That wretched eidolon
That haunted my dreams
That stood in judgment of
All who passed before him
On this unremarkable corner
In this forgotten city of despair
The bastard kin of
Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus
His throne a decrepit cardboard box
His shroud a blanket that reeked of
Age and disease
His crown a greasy scarecrow of gray hair

The thing on the corner
That defiled shade
That I can barely see as
I approach him
He is a mirage
A flicker and a shimmer
I squint my eyes as I stand before him
There is static, a signal dying
Over the expanse of eternity
An imperceptible howl from
Another universe
I reach out a tentative hand
And touch him
For an instant he is there before me
Vital and filled with the
Energy of supernovas
His eyes are alive and
Radiate truth the brightness
Of a hundred suns
He is real
He does not speak but
Only looks at me
For a moment
For a lifetime
Then turns away
And fades to
Nothingness

And the oblivious masses mill
Through the city streets like cattle
To the slaughter
And the city sighs
As anesthetic night descends

“I Stood at the End of the Earth”

On By Mike U.In Poetry2 Comments

“I Stood at the End of the Earth”
© 2013 by Michael L. Utley

I stood at the end of the earth
As it trembled and moaned
Beneath me
The great dark monstrous Pacific
Infinite and unseen
Before me
Mindless
Inexorable
The cliffs below me besieged
By the stentorian onslaught of
Night-cloaked sea

A lifetime of fear has deafened me
I cannot hear it
It does not exist

I stood at the end of the earth
As it shuddered and groaned
Beneath me
The obsidian veil of the void
Stretched taut above me
A canopy of moonless ubiquity
A spray of crystals muted by
An eternity of
Distance and time

A lifetime of sorrow has blinded me
I cannot see it
It does not exist

I stood at the end of the earth
As it writhed and spun
Beneath me
The virginal rays of an
Ancient sun gilding all
The soaring albatross
The breaching whale
The crying gull
The gamboling dolphin

A lifetime of hubris has dulled my mind
I do not know these things
They do not exist

I stood at the end of the earth
As I sought to uncover
The great mystery
The answer is all around me
Everywhere
And forever out of reach

“Air/Water/Air”

On By Mike U.In Poetry1 Comment

“Air/Water/Air”
© 2012 by Michael L. Utley
 
There is no air
Down there
Down in the dark
Where I choke
On my life
Nature abhors
A vacuum
But rage
Thrives
Therein
 
Emptied
Gutted
A carcass
Rotting
Under a red
Alien sun
Gasping a mere
Reflex
I am a fish
Cast upon the shore
Drowning on nothing
Dried eyes
Blind
Bulging
I see nothing
So nothing exists
The calm susurrus of the waves
Is the great deception
I cannot reach
The water
I am not fit for the
Fisherman’s net
The cry of the gull
The sigh of sea grass in the breeze
The languid flap of my tail
The hard hot stones of the beach
The stench of all things
The sea
 
I try to scream
But there is no
Air

“Night Thoughts”

On By Mike U.In Poetry8 Comments

“Night Thoughts”
© 2012 by Michael L. Utley
 
I vomit out myself again each night
When lights go out and tired thoughts awake
To find that darkened mere from which to slake
Their thirst for dark dominion.  In the bright
And sane pedantic musings of the light
Where every thought, word, deed presumes to take
On tones of gilded gravity, I stake
My soul against the coming evening’s fight.
 
The day is done; I’m with my thoughts, alone
And sleep cannot—will not—this night prevail.
My mind, a dynamo, begins to race
And images appear as if they’ve grown
In some dark, dank and fetid fen.  I quail
As my true self confronts me, face to face.
 
I see myself most clearly in the dark
When eyes stare listlessly into the gloom
Of my unlighted silent little room
And clarity has never missed its mark.
The diff’rence between day and night is stark,
Where shadows rob the flower of its bloom
And night-noise bespeaks harbingers of doom
Who from abyssal shores will soon embark.
 
There is no madness here; there is a shift
Of light to darkness only, but in fine
It colors every thought a darker hue
And ushers in a sort of seismic rift
That sullies every fruit on every vine
And every thought and every feeling, too.
 
The day’s lucidity reduced to lies,
I gaze at the abyss and there I see
On some far distant shore another me
Whose own lucidity is in demise.
The shadows—living things amid the cries
And cruel cacophony of things that flee
The light—surround me as if to decree
To all assembled, “This is where hope dies.
 
“What’s done in daylight holds no power here.
We’ll strip the varnish from your petty dreams
And rid you of your sanity anon.
For daylight is a poor façade for fear
And reason ineffectual when screams
Will render moot the light you count upon.”
 
And once again, like every other night
The battle lines are drawn upon the sands
Of sleep not yet attained, and on these lands
Depression pits the dark against the light.
And once again, like every other fight
I fall upon the ground, the shadows’ hands
Upon my throat in icy burning bands,
All thoughts of hope now fading out of sight.
 
And then from distant shores of the abyss
Across the chasm, lilting in the dark
A plaintive, calming voice, a gentle weep
Touches my mind, my soul, as if a kiss
Were sent to me upon a winging lark:
“Seek sleep,” it says to me, “let go, seek sleep.”
 
And I give in and in surrendering
I leave behind the darkness and the din
Of shadowlands where battles rage therein
And naught is won or lost.  And that’s the thing
That catches in my mind just like the ring
Of distant bells, discordant in their thin
Attempt to quell the heart surfeit of sin
In any man whose sleep the night won’t bring.
 
And leaves unanswered still my current plight:
Is truth found in the darkness or the light?

“Heroic”

On By Mike U.In Poetry1 Comment

“Heroic”
© 2013 by Michael L. Utley

The kid was too young
This distant uncanny boy
Face absconded
Into the murky depths of his
Drenched and threadbare
Crimson hoodie
Eyes mere pinpricks
Of sentience in the shadows
Where his face should be
On this pouring midnight
Sidewalk where even the rain seemed
Exhausted in the scornful cones
Of streetlamp illumination
And unseen clouds sighed above
Too tired for the bluster and pretense
Of thunder
And he sat there in this mess of a night
On a bench where no bus would ever stop
For anyone at anytime for any reason
Staring into the distance at both
Something and nothing at once
Moveless save for an occasional shiver
Waiting for someone or something
Or perhaps nothing at all

His shoes were soaking wet
Those black hi-tops iridescent
From rain and gutter filth
His dark spidery fingers
Loomed together in some
Cryptic pattern on his lap
Where rainwater pooled and eddied before
Dispersing first through his skinny legs
Then between the filthy slats of the bench
To merge with the noisy gutter rill
And then with the sewage below
And then the poisonous river
And then the darkness of the ocean
Of some other universe

And I passed him in the rain
Of that eternal night as I made
My own way into my own darkness
And I thought of some worried mother
Sitting at some rickety kitchen table
Bathed in the sickly yellow glow of a naked
Tungsten bulb
Haunted eyes fixed somewhere
Beyond the weeping window panes
Hands wringing in some unconscious
Talismanic effort of projected protection
For some lost child some prodigal son
Out there alone in the rain
And I couldn’t decide if she was
The boy’s mother
Or my own

And then my blackness
Was interrupted by a voice
Behind me
Not that of a man
Yet not that of a child
And I stopped and turned
And the kid was there
And in his outstretched hands
He held a soaked and faded
Red hoodie and a pair of
Sopping black hi-tops
And his eyes were calm
And his face shone in the rain
And he didn’t say a word
He just pointed at my own
Bare feet and my freezing body
And then he was gone
His own bare footprints
Lingering momentarily on the sidewalk
Before the rain took them away