• Mirror

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    September 17, 2015 /  Uncategorized

    Poetry’s a mirror
    Of glass and metal born;
    Something crystal clear,
    something bright as morn.

    But a mirror at an angle,
    it casts a crooked view;
    it takes the known mundane
    and gives back something new.

    In trite works it is simple,
    Just what you’ve seen before;
    Some mirrors’ shine is shallow,
    but others show you more.

    The breathless and sublime,
    The many springs of hurt;
    The beauty in the brutal,
    the dark beneath the dirt.

    Verse reflects them all,
    A mirror cruel and kind:
    It gives you back in plenty
    The depths of your own mind.

  • 5/24/367

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    September 17, 2015 /  Uncategorized

    5/24/367

    I am feeling… better, these days. Even with the onset of summer – the best time for my health, but a time associated with all sorts of horrors and disasters in my memory. Heat and desperation go hand in hand.

    The anniversary of Casimir’s death hit me brutally hard again, as I knew it would despite all my attempts to let it pass as any other day; I rather made a fool of myself. It would have been much worse had it not been for Emma… both the damage to my reputation and my actual experience would have been much worse. The story poured out of me like sick blood from a wound, leaving me… light-headed, and weak, but empty in a good way. Hollowed out. There was a part of that misery I suppose I had never been able to give vent to – a part I suppose I had never fully faced until then. Like many shadows, it withered to nothing in the direct light. Maybe next year, now… maybe next year it won’t be so cruel a day.

    And other, more joyful anniversies are approaching.

    That fragility I was feeling the other day, I think, was a good thing. A gateway to growth, to new beginnings. Every day now it is as if I understand myself better, and who I am to be in this strange landscape born of my disgrace. I cannot claim to have surmounted my problems – I will never truly surmount them. I still feel it like an arrow to the heart every time a commoner cringes away from me at the slightest sign of my displeasure, or hastens to bow with fear in their eyes before I have even said a cross word. But that’s all right. I will show them, with time, that I am not the man they think I am – and if they do not see it? Others have. Others will.

    I will never be a man widely beloved. My temper and my uncompromising values see to that. So long as I am beloved by those that matter, that is enough. And I do have friends. I have Tomas and Bryn and Emma, I have family in Marisa and Shaylei and Rei, and I have… I have enough. More than enough.

    It’s a beautiful evening outside. Perhaps I’ll go for a run.