Bargaining

- The Seasons Of Grief: Chapter III - Poem XII -

I spoke in sonnets spun from silver pleas,

Every line was a tether to the past that I swore could be revised

Ink pooled beneath my clasped hands atop hollowed eaves,

They seeped through the vanilla of my fragile mind

Every stanza swayed between concession and revolt,

A cadence cracked my concentration on the echoes of the lives I swore to help re-mend

Verses bled through my trembling hands as I tried to break from the occult,

The pages were blank, and so was the ground upon which I stand

The leaves fell on my notebook as I wrote below the tree,

They signaled a change in tone and a chapter switch

Printing imagery on the faint soliloquies,

I paid my debt to fate, I discarded a draft just to write again, this time without pitch

I reasoned with the All Hallows Eve spirits to guide me in the foggy way,

I offered them prose laced with a desperate refrain

They said I wasn’t meant to write for ones looking for happier days,

Instead, I was predestined to be a cautionary tale of too much built-up pain

This quill doesn’t abide, nor does it bend to prayer,

The words I tried to erase will stay there, forever etched

The pages will curl against the wind as I loom down the trail,

My bones will break eventually; it’s just a matter of when I take my last breath

Ever since summer, I tried to bend my fractures into something akin to measure rhymes,

I did this to bargain with myself that I’d never stray from the path I chose

No revision will ever mend the grief of past Thanksgiving times,

Even in a metaphor, nothing will break my oath

In fields of death, I stare at the shadows of religion,

Scarecrows mock the ways I’ve been betrayed

I’ll either die a patron or be consumed by oblivion,

And my heart will carry me the rest of the way

I close this chapter with the end of autumn and the stage of bargaining