Prelude

The wily blank page almost took me
But let go, and bested me in disdain.
Dissonantly, I retreat to the yawning trenches,
Sliding, into that grim muted throb.

Inside, the ones wear matte grey gas masks.
Festering wounds and twisted bones
Ignored, as a field of eyes swings towards me,
A bulb flashed, and in every eye I saw me.

Peering past ghostly smoke, I turn to tread
Over pulsing embers, alongst gutted corridors.
Through holes above, the broken hulk of edifice looms,
As footsteps in ashes of hubris mark my path.

In grimy half darkness I grope my way,
Past littered broken things and jagged edges,
Stumbling through the clawing pregnant vacuum
Until I reach the end, that thrice-damned wall!

Sickened by complacent defeat, lethargic spirit,
With last vestige of breath, I beat against
The iron vileness that chokes the multitude of words,
They who create and people my world.

Battered hands shatter unyielding indifference,
Until it cracks, and expression trickles forth!
My war cry melds with the growing storm of sound,
As the legions of words leap the barricade.

And riding the crest of that omnipotent wave,
Enraptured, I am become a forge!
Flinty ideas become the iron-tipped arrows
Which desecrate the vaunted halls of apathy.

Pages fly, ink spills and broken words die,
Until The page kneels under my bladed nib.
The melody of word song fills the world,
And something new, shoots from the bullet holes.


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