Alone... <br />
Hollow... <br />
Ashen.<br />
Life promises only death.<br />
<br />
And thus I am again sentenced to solitude, <br />
In silent contemplation, a vision framed in grey<br />
Falls upon world-weary eyes and brings torpor.<br />
The years behind left drained and colourless.<br />
<br />
I look within to fan the embers, <br />
Charred and enervated beyond recall to flame.<br />
<br />
For so long, I have journeyed, one weary step upon another, <br />
The dust of a decade's failures ground underfoot.<br />
<br />
And so I fix my gaze to myriad desolation.<br />
The harsh wind punished a frail simulacra<br />
<br />
On the precipice of spiritual oblivion, <br />
Without and within only ashes remain.<br />
As the elements now I shall be.<br />
As one with the enduring stone and the onrushing waters of wild rivers.<br />
As one with the burnished hue of the dawn<br />
And the misty closure of the twilit evenfall.<br />
To cross the foils and Stygian peatfields.<br />
To stride unfeeling towards the eternal periphery.<br />
These bitter lands have borne witness to so much<br />
That I now embrace within a lonely<br />
And burned-out will.<br />
<br />
When only distant memories chime across a spiritual vacuum, <br />
The last vestiges of life long since extinguished.<br />
A dying visage whipped by storms charged with the stench of despair.<br />
The entirety of my essence, the nucleus of my humanity now scoured.<br />
<br />
I am Bereft.