It still needs a lot of work...
The painter's brush
The minstrel's song
The author's word
burst like morning light
through shuttered bedroom windows,
shattering oppressive darkness,
and calling sleepers to life.
The selfish and the scared
The tyrant and the tired
pull up the covers, desiring
to only exist in dreams.
Oh foolish, gifted, ones.
Do you not know a gift not given
will turn your dreams to nightmares?
Torrential rains and villainous night
boast in their power
until lightning explodes from the sky
and mutilates the dark.
For a moment, it is day.
Deaf to the cosmic battle
the sleepers are trapped
in their own phantasms.
Some can never sleep.
The fight for light and life
calls any who will wake
and take the more terrible road.
So the sleepless enter the storm
hoping to find their way.
Their way to what, they do not know.
Small, courageous souls
fight to walk through the storm
as light present, and remembered,
builds their courage
to be vessels for the mystery
until it makes itself known.
Understanding less than they believe,
the vessels are filled with the mystery
of all-powerful light, dependent.
What fills them, overflows
in joyous creating of reflected light
like daggers in the eyes of the dark.
Surging back, the night expands
and engulfs the vessels
damming their reflections.
The vessels are too weak
to contain the light they possess.
Illumination grows in the finite vessels
increasing their agony, slowing their pace.
The vessels crawl in the rain-soaked earth,
too aware to go home
too exhausted to go on.
Aching for release
the writer-vessel scours for words
the singer-vessel cries out for his voice
the painter-vessel gropes for color in the dark.
Nothing comes.
Irony too cruel--
the gifted-vessels carry a gift
they cannot give.
The essence of freedom
is trapped in them, and they are lost.
Once comforting warmth
now a violent fire inside
like the sun itself as it almost
surges from the east.
But it waits,
and permits the night expansion.
The rain beats down on the vessels
punching, bruising, killing them.
It was not supposed to end like this
Courage is drowned in confusion
and the vessels wonder why.
Why light dependent?
Why vessels?
Why this war?
The night laughs and glories
in it's victory over the light and the vessels
but will not stop until they are powder.
Still burning inside, the vessels wait for death.
The rain is cutting now
here at the end, the vessels find relief
in being broken.
Like the rush at the end
of hypothermia's course.
They haven't felt this comfortable
since slumbering
in their long-forgotten beds.
If only they had never woken up.
If only.
