The Casualty Of Time Poem by Briony Nicholls

The tizzy glory of spring-youth
Has long since started to quietly wane
A muddied snow-ball, ominous greying edges
Like piranhas, have started their heinous march
By the creeping approach of middle age.

The embarrassing parody of the signs
Indicating one no longer completely resides
In the red-hot hurly-burly world of young love:
Untainted with eccentricities, fortified guards, and
Tearfully vexing boundaries, boundaries.

Barricades that have become set in stone,
Like Moses’ tablets, as the bones soften, lines deepen,
How eternally damned we are to break them!
Conditions, conditions, the requirement of conditions
Abound like the buzz of flies over a stench, from which -

The longing for union, nevertheless, intensifies!
But the slow death-knell rings through safe conversations
A stultifying drowning we pretend to not notice,
Removing ourselves away from each other, o ever so,
Even while, in deep hiding, hearts are ablaze -

Reminding us there is a silent war going on.
The crazy longing quietly continues its righteous existence,
Through the madness of fears and acid rains,
A Siberian winter that trails even hot summers, and
The splashes and explosions of futile love affairs.

What did you expect after a life spent living in shadows?
Can it be? Can it really be?
That a wine reaching sublime maturity
Dying to be picked and consummated like over-ripe plums
Simply becomes too unattainable?

Marriage bells! Marriage bells! The bells
Of icing-cake doom are pealing everywhere like detonations.
‘What am I to do? ’ cries the uprooted beetle waving its arms
‘I do what I do, I am what I am’ replies the hoarse grey stag,
A beacon of inner light on his single mountain-top.

And so with an uncalled-for ecclesiastical honour
One gallops thus, an insufferable, inconsolable loner
For years and years on the colossal journey, no one imagined.
While Love, the perennial sweet ungraspable,
Predicts its own doom from its many tentative uprisings.