Did it take us long to walk over to the broken people,
Letting our compassion change us for a while,
I have not become a saint with an act of kindness,
I am still looking for my oasis in this wasteland,
Everything else is a passing breeze.

The sorrow that filled them in those dark hours
Was my elixir, as I walked forward,
writing my testimonies in the lives I meet on my way.

I have felt grains of sand with my fingertips, my blood
is fatigued, in its course through my flesh,
My veins are distended, toughened, and yet,
They do not tear, and this limbo between
Pain and liberation is Peace within a calamity.

My soliloquy is a bare rasping breath of wind,
Coursing through the streets which led home once,
But are now the lanes of memory, stale in their impotence,
Stinging in their truth, that my existence left behind marks
in the water I bathed in, in the bed I slept in,
in the books I read, which I held,
in the bandages I bled, over the wounds I tried to heal.
On the flag I tried to save, I have wept, Longing
for this journey to end, so I may rest a while.

The diseased have suffered their sickness with stoicism.

I have tried to heal them, succeeded,
failed with a few,
and wondered in the power of Mortality.

My oasis lies in the peaks of the wasteland, I can see it now,
A haze, a sliver of sunlight in this dark wasteland,
Past this murky slush of relationships,
Beyond the cliffs of defeat, and past the rivers
Of Self-loathing criticism.

Goodnight, shadow, now that the light has gone out, so can you.

Goodnight, shapeless impression of my existence,
the only proof of my waking life.

Goodnight, you silent spectator, companion, solace,
If I die, you will exist, because you are part of the very dark
that I sought out in my despair.

Goodnight, my partner in grief, my lover in the dark,
I have left nothing behind, except a few words,
I will have touched nothing from beyond the crematorium,
I only reach out to you, now, in my last hours of waking,
In  my dreams I have no light, to cast you on the wall,
No darkness to draw you from, into the heat of my vision.

I repose now, hoping that you bear witness, again,
while I sleep, that I existed once during the day!

In the evenings, the mist descends,
Casting us all in a blanket of comfort,
Silence is my companion in winter's solitude.
I wished for peace, but found quiet instead,
The bulb in my living room is my sun,
My guiding light, my source of warmth.

I have not loved.

Perhaps my solitude is deserved,
a worthy punishment for the cries of help
that I ignored in my helpless longing for fame.
Ambition is my downfall, the virus that consumes
my waking hours, my dreams, my heart