I am thrilled to present to you a poem written and spoken by K. A. Brace of The Mirror Obscura. KB as I call him writes powerful poem. He is kind enough to send me a copy of his poem even though I did not win on the guessing game. Thank you, KB.
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“Tell No One”
IEver since the sun went down
I have been watching
The trees drink up all the night. Constellations are collapsing, stars
Die of thirst without crying
As the earth is filled with darkness seeping
Through the roots of forests but cannot protest. When the sun attempts to rise again
There will be nothing left for it to hang on.
The sky will be a ghost of dreams
Made mute and imageless by this theft.
I am unsure to wake you for fear
You will not believe what I see.
Without you only stones are witnesses
But will not speak.
They are ambivalent weights of destiny
That care only for themselves.
I am frozen where I stand
Afraid to sleep, knowing when I wake
The world will have changed again.
II
What are you willing to sacrifice
For nothing, letting sacrifice
Be enough of its own?
Are you willing to leave
All lingering doubts behind you
In a trail of sloughed off skins?
Those who follow
Will use them as parchment
To write the unknown stories
Of other lives.
Ask yourself,
What it is you really want
Beyond the atmosphere of being?
The regiments of days
Will march past the spot
You stand on now.
Unable to decide
To mark your place or leave
Nothing to be remembered by
Freezes you in indecision.
You already know what comes after
Can only come
If you give way and leave nothing.
You were nothing and will return to it.
To expect more
Is to wait in an eternity
Of unanswered questions,
You are left with
Answering yourself
With defeat.
III
What is it you fear the most?
It is the thing you love.
It is an unresolvable situation
If we try to resolve it.
Sooner or later fear
Turns into displeasure and love
To hate.
We murder the thing within us
That allows
Love to be a part of us
And all the times thereafter
We know our guilt.
It cannot be expunged,
Forgotten, or covered over.
Every thought we have becomes
One of never having had the faith
To love as we could have loved
Something outside ourselves.
The truth is
We could not find it in our heart
To love ourselves enough
To think ourselves worth loving.
That is the mark of Cain,
The shadow cast by shame.
IV
Somethings
Will never be that sweet.
Bitterness is what we seek
Even unaware as we are
Of how tempting the taste is
On the tongue, the ease
With which some words
Are palatable when said.
There is more vehemence
In the unbridled side
Of life’s ugliness.
When let loose to wander freely
In what is voiced it frees
What hides beneath the skin;
Has been waiting
To be asked
To join in and boast
Of all it has been holding back.
Love cannot wait.
It cannot hide
And so stretches itself out
Underneath every sun and star
Innocent
Of every moment it shows itself
As what it is
Until it feels unloved,
Then grows its scars
Counts them one by one every day
And calls each one by name,
The cause that made the wound.
V
I am caught in the wandering hours,
Pillars carved by a plague
Of halts with their aromas,
Sweet scents of decay, lingering
In tropes no tongue can speak of.
Fountains of drought spew sand
In all directions making a wasteland of the day,
A hollowness of a frigid night.
Neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the planets
Can move in their orbits obstructed
By dead songs of an astrology gone mad.
There is no going back. The past
Has been erased to hide itself
From what lies ahead, bitterness
And the orphaned waiting of the old.
Reluctance has become the watchword
In what wisdom still flourishes
Like an ocean tide that once receded
Refuses to wash once more to shore.
All I can do is watch
As the world shrinks beneath the weight
Of its own shadow on the sky.
If you ever pass this way when time
Has become a voice again
Remember what you have seen here
And tell no one or they will think
You have lost all sense of what is real.
But in remembering it will thrive,
Take on the true life of its own,
As though you had birthed it
With its own freedom.
Related articles
- “Tell No One” (themirrorobscura.com)
- The Mystery Poems (themirrorobscura.com)
- Untitled V (themirrorobscura.com)
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