Gone
And so in then end it comes to this,
The words I long lamented over
To convey the way I feel
End up being spoken into the emptiness
That consumes me,
Not heard by anyone else,
Relegated to a silent scream
In the hollowed-out abyss
That is my soul.
Those last moments,
Cowering beneath the bestial hectoring,
Your cheers victorious,
A gladiatorial sport
Designed to pit the weak against the mighty,
My ears the sole mark
In a colossal audience,
Able to hear pitch and tone
Over the roar of laughter
And the thrashing of vainglorious shields.
A final gurgle,
An abortion of life.
You dissipate though yawning passageways,
Thirst-sated,
Ephemerally interested,
As I pinken the sands of time,
A haemorrhaging kernel crushed beneath your boot
In the subterranean cage of my mind.
By the time I pass,
You won’t even remember my name
And the inky smudge that was my life
Will disappear as though never there.
There’ll be no unsightly reminder
That I ever existed,
That you affected me
That I was too weak to stem the tide
Of all that apathetic laughter.
I die as I lived,
Alone,
A mere figment of your play,
Not so much a person, as a shadow
That could only be seen
Under the spotlight of your cruelty.
© Carly Dugmore.
