Muse

Written Oct. 15, 1998

As you may have guessed, I wrote this when I was feeling uninspired. Some call it writer's block.

Little darkling Muse
Why will you not speak?
Long has our relationship
Been fruitful and near
Now you sit in your corner
Making your observations
Watching, watching the night move away
You, ever a child, never changing
While holding back the change of others
Braking the maturing spirit
Ever desiring constancy
And endless repetition
So brood in your solitude
Perhaps it is I who left you in silence

Estranged, though we are,
I still think on you
Dream of you
And our days of verbose revelry
Pen and paper and adolescent observation
Opening worlds of understanding and fancy
And dark visions of melancholy,
A glorious, brilliant fog
Now an erasure of identity
As I move onward, upward, forward and toward
Growing and finding myself anew

I have long since stopped needing you,
Darkling Muse
But traces of memories linger in the long,
Hollow corridors of my soul
Once, we were one. Once we were many
Always, you resided within my cold heart, even now
We created worlds, formed monsters and fear
I sang the song of bitterness, as only youth can
And you fed me, caressed me, hid me, suppressed

Although those days are my past
Yet you are ever in the present
I rejected them and you
Mythical madness, heroic hallucinations,
Stoic stupidity and daring melodrama
All the lies I never fully believed
But tolerated in the pursuit of art, reason, beauty
I disputed your eminence, power and politic, long ago
I raged against the lost youth, the wasted innocence,
The pretty, candy-covered rocks that break at my teeth
The fearful running and careful watching
But mostly, I loathed the not-quite living, the half-life,
The shadow existence, the broken home that is me

And as you walked away, dejected
Little darkling Muse
I wondered what I had left?