The cauldron bubbles, and within it, the witch dies,
But a curse plagues the children still.
Many were killed and stuffed into pies.
The survivors hold on by sheer force of will.

Growing up they seek to change the world, of course,
Because they’ve seen the justice of evil.
However, evil is an evolving force,
Tumbling us downward like Jack and Jill

At a certain point they stop and stare,
At the carnage that lies before them.
The chaos has spread to everywhere.
Every solution outnumbered by a problem.

“What are we to do in this maddening sickness?”
The children frightfully say,
“We’ve become too weary to witness,
The carnage. Hopelessness,” they say in dismay.

The evil has grown too used to the tricks,
That the children, now adults, have employed.
The evil has reached its zenith and kicked,
Its habit of being destroyed.

Yet out of the simplest of places
A song is simply played
“What lifts our hearts to joy?”
The adults ask, no longer dismayed.

She walks on air and plays the flute,
A sharp shimmering shining sound,
That cuts the vile chord of the evil brute,
It slumps to the bloodied ground.

“Who are you flute-player, and what is that song?”
“I am Silence and this is the end, I have been here, all along.”

A soft, northern wind brushes the bristles of my skin, runs the surfaces of my faces, and steadily chills the bones that lie within.

It flows around the contours of thought that bubble and break the surface of motion, of time.

In this dream state, patches of warmth and wet, sunlight and oceans green rise and fall with the breath of my aging body.

Empty and desolate, the eyes of a lover can be... cruel and merciless as death it, weighs upon the arms like a politician's troubling words to his constituency.

Truth is hard to bear when it is birthed twin, with contempt and sin.

The dead lie and the living hide. But each does what the other is purposed to achieve.

So if they each do what the other must, what are they really?

Something else entirely, yet one and the same.
Only the waves of song, crashing against the drums of my psyche, beating me to a calm submission can alleviate the pain of loss.

The pain of want is something that, when destroyed, grows anew, strong, and more violent.

Until satisfied with fire and soapstone, washed away without a moment's notice, the breaking heart will continue to beat for no one can stop passion.

For a moment, love is all that gleans in the rays of life. All these, and all around, slow down to a halt.

The end is when you decide, none of it provides happiness.
The end is when you decide, nothing in life, is worth the blood that was spilt to keep it.

So I wander in a world that makes no sense to the lover unknown, grasping for the essence of something real in the distance. Something I cannot see.