Here I am bleeding again
Taken aback by mortal fear
                     Staring at faith
                   Staged by hope
Pouring rain on visceral cage–
               The sound of deep
                       Calling to deep.

Repressed feelings buried by time
Epitaph reads on the forgotten grave

"Here lies the child now grown
  His hopes and dreams
       Dashed to pieces.
  This is where the child died."

I often hear the Mystic Keeper
        Calling from night
And tradition calling from artificial light

As I run through scorched barren
                          Fields of doubt

Walking barefoot over these coals
    Crouching low
                   To hide my eyes

As I run    
         And as I hide    
  From what has already been revealed--
The tombstone says it all.

When I am out on the water
Lost in the Channel fog
I often see fleeting glimpses of
                     White cliffs of hope
Shining on the edge of Melancholy Sea--  
     But they turn out to be just
Withered white
       Seeds of religious platitudes.

        And then there is the ready reflection
Of the looking glass
        That often tricks the beholder
For in it truth is not seen
What is seen is graffiti of soul
       Hiding the crumbling
                         Cracks of age–

The threshold where
         Sanity meets its end.

Isolation has become
       A shining steel blade
Cutting deep
                    Into the heart of hearts

Nothing lives after amputation
Depending on emotional prosthetics--
Phantom pain
                  When nothing is there.

But in the midst of these devastations
I am learning to take

     Howbeit reluctantly

The hand of trust and grace
And to allow
                        Hope to build
      A fortress for dreams…
Set boundaries better
       Than no control at all.

               --Daniel Irwin Tucker