Signs And Sighs Poem by Michael Walkerjohn

(As All of Life Dies)

My essence
ambushed by
life's uncertainty
flails in long held passions
passing towards the new sun
above earth's cruel massing skies.
Then, from my torn insides pour
living's tears, glistening upon
this worn and haggard flesh.
This covering now sparse
brittle kindling unworthy
to reignite that pyre on which
rests this journey's lies; wholly viewed
by the one living and all-seeing eye.
This earth, no more the sphere
lays in disarray and death.
One's harmony more beneath
life's thorns, as quietly and so quickly
time has slayed this now wingless form.
Thus, condemned to ground and brought
to wounded knees, IAM lost to light of day.
Solitude becomes the slow dive; perchance
that will, refreshing what reactant mix
my lowly spirit must now dissolve
to so soothe living's loss.
And living on does so resist
my willingness to insist of wants
these being this lost soul's tourniquet
twisted tightly so that my intrinsic substance
pour not out, upon this planet's soil.
Severely, I acknowledge these feelings
that to sever my last breaths take
from love's pain and life's sadness
to then so sorely drown in forever all
tenderness, and waive to desperation's blind.
Everything that ever was, to this day become
the earth's last unworthy and faithless word.
For in my journey here, to this place beholden now
I find people no longer power filled but powerless
in lack of togetherness, void of usefulness in time
each bleak and single spaced; not to be shared.
Nothing spares the fears and losses here
in this bottomless and heartless fall from grace
of both man and creator; and the tightness in my stance
broken and mercilessly bowed forevermore, anxious
panicked, feverishly guessing that indeed IAM
just in sleep, deeper than the dark beyond
the universe and slain so, never to awake.
And it seems humanity is willing to follow
to casually wallow near and behind me
towards what the skies reveal as signs
of one's fleeting last chance
one's muffled last sigh
as all of life dies.