THE PRICE OF LOVE

Within pain, one may find a cleansing,

Within darkness the possibility exist for light,

Within the soul rest a doorway to a passion,

which marvels the heart with the inevitability of true love,

Yet within that love, smoulders the fire of heart-breaking pain…

For what does light teach, but of the dark?

Compassion but a way stone marker of despair?

Fire -the devourer- just the means of destruction?

And love, like a harlot heavy with the pangs of burgeoning hate…

Where does a dove find shelter from a storm?

Who has never known the horrific pain of heartbreak?

Screamed out in frustration to the heavens above?

Who has never felt the poignant aching of the soul?

Shadowing the eyes with the dark press of excruciating torment,

the weeping bite of tears leaving tracks of misery upon ones face

This then, is my story…

Of a failing heart of rose, smothered by the bitter tang of sulphurous ashes,

Purged in a turbulent storm of rack and ruin,

The light of my soul a fitful flicker away from dissolution,

Each breath -lungful of air-

Each exhalation, a diseased cry of moribund pain,

As the fickle strands of destiny draws tighter and tighter about my shattered heart…

Can you hear my gruesome moan of horror?

Can you hear my desperate cry of despair,

as the brutalized house of my spirit is raped

by the voracious hunger of terror,

tearing hungrily upon the body

upon the vessel,

upon the memory, of my love?

Inexorably it saps the will,

Drains the strength form limbs grown weak with debauched lassitude,

As vulnerable as a child,

Innocence -diminished, deteriorated, dying-

Burned away to be replaced by a rage of darkness,

A seething cauldron of deepest night,

Of chaos voicing icy shrieks of bitterness and rage,

An animal surge of desperation,

Breaking like a tidal wave of loathing upon my cancerously beating breast…

This is a story, not so much in deeds done,

But of emotions felt…

Of loss-

The irretrievable dispossession of the soul-

Heartache-

Sorrow-

Pain-

It surges into that quiet moment between heartbeats,

The infinitesimal pause between breaths,

A malignant thread of concentrated suffering,

 unfurling like the black wings of death,

 within the festering morass of my soul,

It’s a choked song of damnation…

Of anguish…

A dirge to the dying -emotions lost-

A lamentation voiced into the twilit caress of the night,

Heavy with the thick taste of oppression;

A self-inflicted curse,

Like a putrefying wound,

Bloated flesh,

Wracking the body with a fever of inconsolable grief,

Insidious…

A tantalizing breath of air wreathed in the perfumed musk of helpless anger,

The abject dispersal of hope; dwindling…

… receding further, ever further,

From hands stretched forth in yearning supplication,

While fingers of darkness rise,

Clutching with skeletal fingers of dread…

Of turpitude blanketing the soul in a hopeless miasma of debilitating sickness,

The minute flex of depression,

Cutting flickering gasps of pain into the field of desolation which is the heart,

Relentlessly it drags floundering thoughts into a quagmire of livid misery,

Utterly consumed by a barrage of hurt…

Of torment like a whip flaying all emotions from the heart,

Consumed by the lacerating caress of rejection,

My awareness grows dull;  quiescent,

As if all the air is being squeezed from my lungs,

All life…

All joy…

Arrested from my heart,

Leaving it unrecognizable,

Rendered like lumps of diseased offal,

The soul, a cess-pit of bile and vitriol,

A decay of all compassion as the spirit is cleansed upon the barbed coil of abhorrence…

Hear me then, yes listen…

For the price of love is nothing but… heartache,

This then is the weight of the cross I bear,

That within the light, I can only behold darkness,

Within the heart , the echo of nothingness cries

Can you hear it?

The susurrus voice of ghostly memories,

Capering in a fit of dementia induced joy,

through the cracked and bruised landscape of my mind,

It resonates within the blasted chasm of my heart,

A penetrating rape against the consciousness,

ripping the fabric of my emotions to shreds,

the rampant thrust of destruction unleashed by the cruelty of an indifferent heart,

Dimming my eyes to the radiance of the divine,

Ghostly revenants intent on flaying the last vestiges of love from my heart,

Overwhelming the soul with a fog of terror,

Contorted by the resonant shiver of abject impassiveness,

Pleasure an emotion devoid of meaning,

Love a cloud of ashes choking the night;

A sheen if shadows mirrored within the pitiless void of the mind’s eye,

A withering glare of pure loathing, condensed into a gaze of excruciating agony,

Leaving the soul scoured raw,

Whimpering in the throes of mindless hysteria,

A contorted dance of madness within the blasted and desolate field of the heart!!!

Richard ‘Poetikz’ Burton

07/04/2012