By Andrew Darling

You contemplate the final poem
somewhere in late night/
early morning. Beauty has drained
from the divine
and the everyday has become
a medieval rack
of terrifying sensitivity and acute
loss of hope.
The world, its dystopic inhabitants
and all their distorted
machinations have eaten through
your trust. Everything
reminds you of a future that is
dire culmination
of the past. Broken struggle,
friends you sadly love.
Family. Child and wife. Duty scattered
through piecemeal life.
The nothingness and deliverance
that sings and calls.
Existence reduced to two alternatives
and one choice.
The pain crawled inside years ago.
It found residence
in every corner of you. It permeates
each action
and lines the garments of every role
that plays you.
The pressure to be grateful, to be
happy, has brought your grief
to boil, has stewed you from inside.
Your anguish burdens
everyone you love; you offer only
weakness to the world,
to your angelic daughter who
you so want to be whole.
Desperate decision time as seconds
roll like oceans
in the deep nadir of night, peering over
the subcontinental shelf
of your life. You weigh things up, driven
by darkest winds of woe.
And you go.