Writing down
strong words
that don’t mean
what they once did.
Full of holes.
Drained empty.
They no longer
hold the truth.
They used to be immutable.
I used to wake,
and sleep,
and dream
by their eminence.
They held up
to robust scrutiny
and conjecture.
Withstood assaults,
and still stayed
comforting
on the hard, cold, winter nights
when hope was hard to manage.
Now,
it seems they crumble easily.
Under a microscope,
they appear porous
and corrupted from within,
as if they have suffered
from a long disease.
I keep writing.
I keep speaking.
Even in the lonely stretches,
I hear only faint, sickly echoes
heralded back
from the abyss.
These words used to sustain us,
build our culture,
stand under the firmament
like crown jewels upon the earth.
They were once sacred;
describing the elusive face of God,
and mapping out the pathway
from this world to the next.
Now,
they are less than paper.
We speak,
and smoke comes out
of our ashen hearts.
We write,
and type,
but the symbols
have lost all their meaning.
Bizarre hieroglyphs,
no more inspired
than the natural chaos
of the universe.
Bereft of agency,
our minds fail.
We become dull fixtures,
no longer arbiters
of cosmic fates,
but vessels,
cracked and vacant,
for language
is our thoughts,
and hearts,
and our beings.
Sadly,
we are now a world
of ghostly automatons.
Reams of code
replace the sonnets in our hearts.
Cold skins,
mapped upon us,
atom thin facsimiles
of the blood-flushed bodies
we used to inhabit.
A world,
reflective
of the words that made it.
Mournful,
silent,
empty.
Still, I scratch away,
hoping to find
the spark
that once gave our world
life.
HG – 2022
