Blessings or Prayers

Such pain, such little gain and such uncertainty.

The darkest magic of this, my own frustration,

Propped there against my weary aching head, and I?

I could render nothing but my consternation

Of thinking, having activity without dread,

That sat, laid me out. Nothing resembled progress

And though my body still, rampant would be my head,

Pushing out anything new yet all that I’d known

Had been black, rose up, up, rose up to me instead.

Rose up in me like rain fills a flowing river,

From a source high in the hills of my agnation.

It flows like a great dark sea on a moonless night,

Billows like the black smoke of a dark cremation.

No. No fresh light. No sound. No idea. No words.

The ideas lay like an invalid in bed,

No enter, no leave, no rise or fall and no fight

To beat back each tide, with its volume full as lead

And no more weighted fluid could make it fuller

And no words ever make the bitterness unsaid.

Untied knots and tied tangled lines cannot be solved

No blessings or prayers can stop the damnation

I felt like a foot; the foot too small for the shoe

I felt like time had no real fixed duration.