Thursday Poem: Entanglement

Entanglement

It burns and purges deep the hollowness
That lies inside the pain of your recall.
To turn away and leave all your distress
Between these shadows haunting every room
Where you walk looking for a hiding place
Somewhere you can be safe inside the gloom.

You turn away from mirrors trying not
To stare too hard at your now-ageing skin,
Which was so tight, so taut and without blot.
In singing that old half-forgotten tune
You make the cold mistake of memory
In wishing to have something better soon.

Now there are ghosts out walking through these streets,
Entrapped down here by chained bodies and souls
So tattered and torn by all these defeats,
While they go floating free in dreaming times
Of their own creation, inside a world
They never leave, even as midnight chimes.

Not reaching out to touch the living earth,
Nor breathing under the strong warming sun,
That grows a life up out of each new birth.
Not moving through a land where they belong
As each new day comes falling slowly down
Around them, each singing their lonely song.

All they have is distance all around,
Voices from elsewhere calling out to them.
The siren songs, a cool hypnotic sound
All taking them away from now and here
And leaving their forgotten souls behind
To dance on through this deep entangling fear.

And there is nothing left behind, apart
From only these few stones left bare and cold
That tell no stories, still as you depart.
The time here, left to itself turning in
On itself, past and future tangling up
And twisting, ending so that it can begin.