Lost in the dark again
So vast and clear
It could be space
Stars winking, feet uncertain for a moment on the ground
I look up
I look out
And there is nothing and no one.
But we have
Been here before.
Down the darkened drive I walk
Unhurried
For I have long since learned
How hard it is to fear the things of the night
If you are one of them.
The blackness parts like mist before me
Stirring, inky,
And I pass through it like a ghost
And it sizzles along my skin like black water.
Maybe in the day you could make me kneel,
Maybe you could wring tears from me,
But you are of the light.
Your eyes dance sunshine
Your hair holds gold now, and red.
You smile and turn the lights on
Everywhere at once.
But I walk and darkness follows me like a faithful hound,
Its black eyes glittering, its breath silent, hot and cold at once.
I can with impunity walk among the filaments of fog that stand in the air when the moon sinks into the velvet curtains of the sky
And I can look at you now, paler in my mind, smaller than you seemed.
Here, now, no matter how I may have loved you, you cannot scare me,
For your light, although it brought me joy, was never my light.
Here it can be snuffed like a flame, a sudden brilliant candle which came
Unprepared for the chill.
It was reflected, dancing, for a moment
In the depths of me, like sunlight glinting off minnows in the shallows of a fathomless lake
And briefly I craved it- as all dark things briefly do-
Something golden and warm, something like the way laughter sounds, something so foreign and so new.
But here I am now at the bottom
And I am silent,
And my joy in what I am is something different, darker, fuller, like the smell of soil after rain.
Not tremulous, not fearful,
This is a wild, ancient joy,
This is the joy of a creature which knows it can live in the dark,
Something which has been buried time and again
And still, perversely, breathes.
Something which has learned to feel its way
With the same small, sensitive hands so often burned and battered by embers and shards of glass
Shed by loves which burnt to ash and shattered, suddenly and violently, to little more than dust.
This is the slow-smiling joy of something which has gradually become, through unwilling struggle, very hard to ****,
And with almost smug relish it looks upon anyone who quails at the night
Or starts at the sudden breaking of a twig in the dark.
This is the complex, lonesome joy of the wolves as they howl at the moon.
It is my power, to walk softly through the darkness and let it touch me,
Throw back my head and feel its coolness raise the hair along my arms.
To be free from fear in a place built from it.
And this is the reason I can walk away from you and your tempting light:
You held me briefly in your arms,
But I hold in me an echoing darkness, great and terrible, and it croons to the night,
And although that night is brutal and cold to the bones, it does not ask me to be different.
And although it may swallow me
At least will swallow me
Whole
Unsullied and as I am
Unchanged, unchangeable, unapologetic-
Full of everything you ever ran from
And full of all the reasons that,
If you're so scared,
You should run faster.