Smith, Michael: The Troubled Soul

We poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

                    William Wordsworth

He walked the streets of the undead.

Before his eyes drunks fell into their graves.

Merchants in pinstripe dealt in rags and bones.

Beyond the city, cemeteries dominated the landscape.

Nightingales croaked above leprous willows.

The bells of empty churches tolled sadly.

Blue shadows on limed walls stalked him.

One was his sister's, whose endearments

abated his loneliness but pained him to the quick.

Where was he going? Beyond an imposed self

no longer himself, to create a new self.

But who and out of what to create a new self?

Delving into the depths of the dead

in vain he sought answers to his distress.

Then back to a dark sky and flashes of lightning.

In his madness

he traversed plains in search of redemption

for himself and all his kind.

Demons not angels

danced on the needle point of his mind.