Oh, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer. Miranda in The Tempest
I was terrified of the things waiting for me
The illusions were disappearing
Killing me in a sequence of silences
Everything was rushing
It was too much for me
Firefalling like Yosemite
Around the clock
Tearing off flower petals
I wish I could stop
Wanting to possess beauty
The fragility annihilating me every eve
I grieved I grieved
Then I melted to eternity
The spectacles
Winnowing me
Into singularity
Accumulated light
From the floods of daytime
Limbs of light peeling my sleeping eyelids
Wayless like the breaking days
I couldn't survive the pillars of creation
I was traveling sargasso seas
When the spectacles witnessed me
Spawning sun in the dark stations of night
I was a newborn babe
With an inquiring gaze
Before the shockwaves
I flamed amazement
Vanishing into territories of mist
I admit jealousy of infinity's edgelessness
The Earth owes me nothing
And still I wanted
A cloud creature fearing descent
I made a transaction with the darkness
Blossoming moon glow swallowing me whole
A funeral for the planet
I was at the wake
For the vanishings
And I prayed
That the flowering jasmine spring
Hadn't missed me
I was a sorcerer
Classifying the fires
Like an archivist of light
I saw Carthage destroyed
And I wanted more
A Valkyrie of the warlights in succession
Like a rich man needling through the eyes of heaven
I wanted impossible things to happen to me
Slumbering in the fever-furnaces of dream
It was existence like a leech that desiccated me
I would not betray the sound and fury
Epiphanies from the tempest
And yes we were sleepless
I was a gilded firebird on that horizon
I would inject my blood
Into the veins of earth
Spin light with the Spinners
Bear witness to that disaster
Carthage was history
I was a jewel of the earth
Before the grief reduced me
Endowed with reason and I wanted to give it up
Siren of the night
Grief reduced me
I was a bride of the disaster
The light was spinning
And I wanted it to Go! Faster!
I was a silhouette of the sun
Demons from the deep drumming
Like a refugee of fire
I was consumed by wounds
A history of my being
And it was annihilation
I saw the ocean surfacing in barricades of waves
Like the last gleaming rays of day
And I needed mirages sustaining me
It was too much
Time like a scimitar
A traitor even to idleness
I was in the dust with the locusts
Sleeping away eternity
Reduced by grief
I would not betray the sound and fury
Epiphanies from the tempest
And yes we were sleepless
What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time? Prospero in The Tempest