Bereft

Alone...
Hollow...
Ashen.
Life promises only death.

And thus I am again sentenced to solitude
In silent contemplation, a vision framed in grey
Falls upon world-weary eyes and brings torpor
The years behind left drained and colourless.

I look within to fan the embers
Charred and enervated beyond recall to flame.

For so long, I have journeyed, one weary step upon another
The dust of a decade's failures ground underfoot.

And so I fix my gaze to myriad desolation
The harsh wind punished a frail simulacra.

On the precipice of spiritual oblivion
Without and within only ashes remain
As the elements now I shall be
As one with the enduring stone and the onrishing waters of wild rivers
As one with the burnished hue of the dawn
And the misty closure of the twilit evenfall
To cross the foils and stygian peatfields
To stride unfeeling towards the eternal periphery
These bitter lands have borne witness to so much
That I now embrace within a lonely
And burned-out will.

When only distant memories chime across a spiritual vacuum
The last vestiges of life long since extinguished
A dying visage whipped by storms charged with the stench of despair
The entirety of my essence, the nucleus of my humanity now scoured.

I am Bereft.