Winter's Embrace: The Howling Of Misery - May 28,2025 Poem by Leria Hawkins

So heartless the master
To take all, to ravage, a savage
Leaving nothing to reclaim
Passion lost, squandered and scattered
Across a thousand midnights devoid of song
Just a lonesome passage on an endless highway
A wasteland, featuring a slow cruel death

While the muse, a dirty dealer
Scutters away like a fattened cockroach
Burrowing itself deep and untouchable
Just when the itch is creeping, and fire is seeking
The familiar comforts of the flame
The greedy bastard, leaves no trace
No scrap for shelter on this blackest night

So brutal the dreams
To poke and gouge at my eyes
Robbing me of sleep, of peace
Leaving me to linger as a soulless corpse
The living dead, betrayed and broken
Existing in the heinous clutch of semi-consciousness
Forever yearning for the solitude of the grave

So very vast, the emptiness
A cavern of unimaginable depth
Walls blackened by grief and sorrow
Pain, the only memento of a life once lived
The constant coiling of the tightening rope
The polished glint of the blade
Sweetly crooning a sad swansong

Silence, sweet, sweet silence
The last prayer, a final breath
Time crawls painstakingly slow
Inching to the final curtain call
The dull thud of earth
Relief, peace, oblivion…
Winter has come at last