okay, I got tagged. here's the only poem I care to post right now.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

(no subject)

I lay in bed early this morning -- well, yesterday morning, really -- with my head pressed against the wall, chasing sleep that I never did find.

At 4 AM, every car down that road outside is a purring and a slight soughing you can hear long after it's gone. Every brush of the tree against the roof is a rustling like a tiny clawed and fearthered thing, scrambling for freedom. And the darkness behind my own eyelids seemed empty, without any electric slideshows of thoughts, no glimmerings of quickfire ideas.

I remember when it wasn't like that. I used to bring myself awake in the morning chasing dream sequences into the light. I spun fantasies and built my days, my hopes, my world, on words. I never believed that those words would desert me. I haven't been non-verbal since I was pre-verbal. I might not choose to use my voice, but to lose my words -- that was impossible.

And still.

Imagine, from childhood, from your first steps, being acquainted with a deep well. Being accustomed to letting down your bucket, and sometimes needing to let it fall quite far before you heard it splash and felt the tug against your hands as it filled. Imagine that it comes and goes with the tides, in some cycle of its own, so that you grow used to fallow times ... and then imagine that one season, you let your bucket down, day after day, to the fullest extent of your rope, and come up empty ... and for longer than you have ever known it to last before, the drought lingers.

Imagine how you go about replacing or refilling such a deep place in your own spirit and heart. How long do you wait, before giving up? Where do you begin to look, once you accept that you must?

I'm at the point of acceptance, with no clue where to search first.