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POETRY
When Peril Shifts
An almost poem
There is relief at the moment peril ends and damage begins. Qualified relief. Up to then, it is all anticipation, and when danger turns to harm the anticipation is over: the fight has begun. There is simplicity in this impact. Once hazard shifts to injury, an absolute logic comes into play, it offers a semblance of a break from nuance. There is no subtlety in the struggle to survive. Clarity is the only and inadequate compensation for fears becoming present tense destruction.
Rolling devastation brings with it a new horror: chronic loss. An ever-widening wound conducts the grinding of circumstance. Without chance of respite, nor pause to heal, or even catch a breath, good evaporates in the face of persistent trauma.
Spreading decline seeps into cracks desolating solace. Calamity displaces hope as it ravages all. Wreck rules the day. Endurance splinters.
Where is the bottom? Surely the void itself must be at hand it seems until new layers of disintegration are discovered and extinguished in a breath.
Without relent, expectation becomes only memory.
Without a bottom, progress loses meaning.
And there’s the gift. Unbound by planning, the only thing near possible is new. The new and unrecognized, unimagined and…
