Dan Williams

Learn To Be Still

Tired heart left unprotected from arrogance,

believing reality’s cruelness to be safely walled off from me.

Caught flat footed and unprepared for inevitable circumstance

with not any idea of what now will become of me.

Distressed, in this trench of discontent and disappointment,

who knew how crushing grief can evolve into,

leaving me wondering if I ever will be well again?

 

Losses like hammer blows in rapid succession

have favored hermit-like reclusion like before.

Unsure of accuracy of such desperate confession,

as if false ego is only the same coat that I ever wore.

Unnumbered pages of limbo turned by the wind

describe how I washed and washed,

unable to get clean.

 

Documentation of failure in another lurid novel,

not leaving out how the width of it left me to grovel

over the alibis that inhabit this silent labyrinth;

of regret, of hindsight, of I’m sorry.

Grasping at redemption using poetry as disguise,

weaky pretending I may still rise and discover

how to learn to be still.