{"id":4632,"date":"2015-09-26T19:10:26","date_gmt":"2015-09-26T19:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/?p=4632"},"modified":"2015-09-26T20:37:37","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T20:37:37","slug":"as-my-blindness-burns-a-poem-by-allison-grayhurst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/as-my-blindness-burns-a-poem-by-allison-grayhurst\/","title":{"rendered":"As My Blindness Burns. A Poem by Allison Grayhurst"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nWithout these things
\nof rainbow and insight
\nI stand, fragmented
\nby despair, fleeting as daylight,
\ncomposed of failed hopes
\nand held-back tears.
\n 
\nYoung, like truth is
\nwhen first found,
\nare the swollen joys
\nof new understandings.
\nAnd secret still is
\nthe unsculpted future
\nthat rises unexpected without
\nresolution.
\n 
\nThe muses of this universe hold faith
\nand doubt equally
\nin their impregnated beams,
\nand me with my hideous cowardice
\nthat grows stronger with age, hides
\nthe things that challenge
\nand direct me to an edge, ignoring the
\nsimple surrender needed
\nto grow and to deeply be
\nsomeone.
\n 
\nThis city sobs
\nwhen hearing its own wind die,
\ntakes in its industrious hands
\nthe sluggish and the bitter.
\n 
\nAnd the few who rebuke
\nthis smog-breathing serpent
\nlean depleted in each other’s arms,
\nhoping to embody something beyond
\nthe world or melancholic pain.
\n 
\nAnd here, wanting, each slave is born, each
\nmistrust upheld like a perfected attitude.
\n 
\nPeople hold conviction without vision,
\nwalking the subway floors, staring
\nout to empty highways.
\nStale are the nutrients of each wished-on star.
\nStale ambition bleating into
\neach small ear.
\n 
\nLament now the corpses in caverns,
\nin parades and family restaurants.
\nLament the eclipsed beauty of impulse,
\nthe restraint of every compelling break-a-way.
\n 
\nFor just one hope to tread behind
\nJesus’ sandal, freeze,
\nthen crack all chains.
\n 
\nI would delight
\nin the struggles of individuals
\nconquering the downcast clouds
\nthat hinder and fill a soul
\nwith stagnant woe.
\n 
\nBut like I am, sick with human
\nneeds, political and ungenerous, I face
\nthe storms and hide my pleas inside the
\nthunder.
\n 
\nNaked, lovers divulge
\ntheir infinite shades. Lovers
\nlean like dried up trees against
\nan autumn’s ground, lean
\nfor mercy and for each
\naffection denied.
\n 
\nBut love they do
\nin the wintry airs
\ntrying to overcome
\npersonality, embedded habits,
\neach other’s foreign sphere.
\n 
\nI am pale, forgetful,
\nI lie awake all night taken down,
\nbreathing the vaporous stench of
\ndecay, in nightmares,
\nwhile kneeling before
\nthe brightest flower.
\n 
\nI watch you thinning,
\nkeeping
\nmy anguish private,
\nfor none will accept my five open
\nsenses, the reasons for my withered will.
\n 
\nI cannot embrace my interior
\nwith humble affection, but must
\nknow the labyrinth’s breathing tide;
\nmysteries renounced, complexities explained
\nby pensive reason.
\n 
\nWhere I sit, seeking the inaccessible cure,
\nmadness comes to kill through dissection,
\ndefinition and spiritual systems decreed.
\n 
\nIn water I am numb,
\ndrifting dazed through dark
\nandrogynous waves.
\n 
\nI think of whispering to your waiting grave,
\nof netting grief and memory,
\nstarving each of their sustenance
\nblind.
\n 
\nBut then alone, in death, in life,
\nconnection is our bread,
\nour higher air that beckons and repairs
\nthe cracks that would kill on
\ntougher days.
\n 
\nHow long to hold you in this sandpit sinking?
\nHow long to watch your unwilling heart fade?
\n 
\nThat I am through with annihilating snares
\nThrough with the brutes of cold consuming despair
\n 
\nThrough your life yielding to
\nsudden disease, through the closed door
\nthat echoes strong sighs like screams
\ndown corridors of love’s
\nlast stroke . . .
\n 
\nLonging for nether fields,
\nI want to run
\nin these subterranean, primal places, want
\nlimbs of fire, eternally
\nred and dancing over the waking darkness.
\nI want to seal you
\n 
\ninto the living Divine.
\n 
\nI am suspended, believing
\nthe horror will not come, believing
\ndeath will not make
\na skeleton out of you. 
\n 
\n 
\n\"Allison<\/a>
\n 
\nBio:
\n <\/p>\n