Max Lathrop
Close your eyes and witness how I feel
Away in my tomb where everything’s a catastrophic deal
Now expose your eyes: break the seal
Watch my movie as it spins off the reel
In this bleakness, faces blur
But then sparks from my distemper spur
The flame aglow, attaching to souls like burs
It seems I attack everyone, you concur
I set myself on a shelf
Save me from myself!
“I can’t do this alone,” I scream as into my past I delve
Strike on a box of matches; the sparks like ripples made by stones
thrown into the ocean into which I delve
Soaking in the moonlight
A white rose in a plot of daisies holds its petals tight
The ocean waves crash down, and the rose loses its petals in the night
These are the stressful nights behind locked doors, when I’m out of sight
Who will fix me now?
I’m exposed; I’ll tell you how
My dreams float on clouds of smoke and then pow!
I’m disrupted from my internal tragedy and I take a vow
Step inside my ring
Where I can’t hear a thing
Water to my eyes it brings
“Everything’s not alright,” the silence sings
Dark colors trap me with their grasp as the moon, again, begins to glow
There’s a cataclysm in the silence of the snow
Look what I found, the stem of the white rose! What do you know?
Growing with the moonlight, ready to provoke the ocean: its foe
After the rose’s drastic decay,
The rose thought to itself, “You’ll be okay.
The battle will go on another day.
The ocean will eventually lose the fight to his dismay.
Don’t you see? This rose will never surrender
The ocean’s just an outrageous bully, the ultimate pretender
Take the waves and return to sender
The sea won’t be my story ender.”