Foreign Body

An inner scream?
What does that mean, anyway?
The sense of vacuous self-delusion
Which belies
A psychedelic desperation:
The agony of
Broken dreams, tortured hope –
Barren love? Fruitless affections?

How, then, do I scream?
Do I open-up my soul
And let them see my pain, my love –
The charred remains
Of my secret pyre of smothered dreams,
Wailing like babes abandoned?
Abandoned in the rain
That’s keeping me from sleep.

The tears that come
Come not from me –
But from some expectation:
Some socially-acceptable display
Of something far from what I feel.
If, indeed, I do feel.
These tears are alien to me
And my system must reject them.

Truth is beauty,
Like a dark, haunting image –
A painting of famine or death or greed
By some starving artist,
Ragged and hollow-cheeked…
If only these tears belonged to me,
If only there was some release,
If only I could bleed.

But they are alien to me.

Should I, like Dido,
Climb upon the pyre
And sacrifice myself
For love, for truth…
And cry out that I believe,
That I shan’t abandon ship
But choose, instead,
To sink beneath the surface?

Dare I, to be free?

These tears are alien to me.

SJL: 17th December, 2003