Poetry for Troubled Souls

My world crumbles.

Lights on.

Clutter.

Shoes.

Easels.

You stab me with your truths.

I long for touch.

Kisses.

Attention.

Love.

No longer will my heart bleed.

Hopes.

Fears.

Longings.

Lusts.

Soul-death and detachment carve my wounds.

Gouged.

Cruel.

Uncared.

Undesired.

Impossible for love to fire unsullied.

Unbidden.

Unshorn.

Collaborative.

Fresh.

Empty vows of colorless nights.

Soulless.

Callous.

Arctic.

Isolated.

What one day passed for dreams

Now lies as molten fodder

Crafted disaster’s manifest destiny -

A rubble of fabrication, deception and folly.

Era ended with no beginning

Seasons change with no reprieve

I die each night you abandon my heart

Lay to rest my troubled soul.

Have you ever been involved in a long term relationship where your mate nearly completely becomes another person? I am sure many of you feel like this has happened to you. But I'm not speaking of personality traits purposefully hidden. I'm speaking of a personality make-over. An about-face from the person you once knew to the person you now live and interact with.

Again, I'm positive many out there have had to deal with this. Although, I see the possibility for the change to be positive, somehow, I believe the majority of people who've gone through this feel the even to be more to the negative side of life.

How do you cope with a changing emotional landscape? How do you keep yourself in check when all the patterns you once knew and your heart and mind felt familiar with, now morph into a minefield of miscommunications and alien feelings?

This poem addresses the loneliness, frustration, pain and sadness of someone forced to cope with new rules of emotional engagement. Fair and right and wrong do not own seats around this table. The person who is changing endures internal chaos and the person witnessing the metamorphosis must regroup and redefine their positions as well.

The fallout from all this upheaval can destroy relationships. The fallout can splinter one or both person's center of who they believe themselves to be. The fallout carves rivers of questions with far too few answers.

The second stanza addresses the person who is changing. The pretense of 'nothing wrong' stabs cruelly at the person who must adapt to an altered emotional soup, the flavor of which may be quite bitter.

As time passes through, the demoralization and realization that life will never be as it once was and the new direction is totally out of eithers' control. The dreams the two crafted through the years become a lie, a fabrication. As the very wise man Solomon once said, it was all a "chasing after the wind."

There are times we all must endure when we feel the weight of others' pain. Many of us cannot bear the oppressive pressure nor the nearly complete redirect of what once was mapped out and clear. A couple decades of familiarity down the refuse flume. No tidy crash and burn. More a maelstrom of confusion, distraction, demoralization and an emptiness that refuses to hold anything of value.

Troubled souls can beget troubled souls. Finding ways to hold onto hope is a trick that eventually fails due to time. Whoever said time is the great healer waxed a bit too broadly. Time, in this instance, is a torturer who shows no mercy - to either party involved.