Effigy

Thoughts dance along upon a snow-swept breeze

slicing through a threadbare mind with ease.

Flashing their flickering memories-

a picture-perfect simulacrum of serenity-

over the chalk drawn visage of mediocrity.

Temperatures dropping at a precipitous rate,

patiently waiting for the mirror to break.

Someone come strike a match for God's sake;

there's a sweat-dampened fuse that still needs lighting,

the sparking crack of desperation's lightning

within a shivering soul that's tired of fighting.

If cold is nothing but a lack of heat,

and silence is the sound of missing a beat

then play my song, put it on repeat,

and drown out the ramblings of a soul replete

with the comfortable weight of frost-caked concrete.

I've come to miss the rains that hung overhead.

Their relentless rhythm carving shallow treads

in the empty spaces between what I never said

and the sharpened words that left me in shreds.

Washing out the moss-grown graves of wars past,

sweeping away bones from the blood-stained grass

grown from the ashes of an impassioned outcast

who dared cling to undiluted dreams steadfast;

soaring on wings of glass too fragile to last.

Whenever my dormant mind wakes, I think

I'll shred the paper scarred with this sympathetic ink

of an archaic apparition, exiled to the brink,

hanging over the cliff of unspoken annihilation-

swept off by incessant waves of precipitation

falling from emaciated eyes starved of communication.

Yet embers still kindle at the foot of the effigy

that lit up the night in resplendent tragedy.

A symbol of catalyzing possibility

engulfed in the spirit of ascendancy

consumed to be left in our memory

as the culmination of long-stifled creativity.

Motivation's absence isn't what checks my hand;

I'm driven by forces I can't possibly understand.

If it takes the very last breath from my lungs

to scream the words that scald my tongue,

reverberating louder as they linger unsung

among aspirations searing hotter as they remain undone,

then I'll die from the cuts of a thousand words;

a single picture's price for a life spent undeterred

in the hopes of one day not only being heard...

But answered.