When, if not now?

A recluse to your own life,

are you banished from your own time and space?

When should you emerge from solitary submersion

into mental goat-cheese hills,

clouds coating molasses hillsides, at night –

fallow-fogg’d and faint?

Fainting in self-imposed hunger

you wander, buckling at knees,

well-scabbed, heaven-noticed.

And for all that, so little to show.

It’s the sound of excuses low on batteries.

The oldest, leather’d tales of one made sick

on sumptuous delights of dark.

And still, all those black, moonlit hills of your desires,

shivering wistfully in an adder’s den of want.

“Do you want to be healed?”

Such a stupid question, unless you’ve seen

all this before in light-adjusted caves

of self-pity; the forlorn battle-weary sojourners

preferring to fight without armour, eyes closed.

Closed to adulations begged for, wept over, demanded, refused.

Full steam ahead on an undersized train

sliding down carefully-crafted embankments of misfortune.

Divvy out carefully those shelter-shined coins of detail,

actual currency of a life lived on purpose.

Let your body to your soul state its intentions well –

walls you painted over, once your prison –

now, just old, flayed relics

of too many days reminding you

of too many days.