Photo by Alex_L on DepositPhotos.

Flowers wilt and

bloom again,

a child gestates

inside my friend.

But this sickness is the furniture.

From cosmic rivers

sunlight pours,

a lost cause.

This grief is

big for her age.

Ponder footprints

through a periscope,

a misplaced hope;

numbed

in the amber of now.

Every eye contact

an alternate reality,

a terrifying fantasy.

I dither about on a

comet hurtling towards devastation.

An infinite labyrinth

choked

with one-way exits.

Every choice

murders another.

Malaise, white hot,

in sets the rot;

these apathetic canyons

buffeted

by a raging nothing.

She is an anchor,

a lighthouse,

a tether to this world.

Yet at every crossroad

I take defeat lying down.

An ageing wastrel,

grown misshapen,

wading in the quagmire.

Thirty years peering

into the great maw.