Modern Romanticism

It sold the state,
continuing to exist
with grains ingrained
under fingernails,
from trying to crawl
from the bottom
back to the top.

I was always
buried further,
dragged back under
to continue to drown,
without dying.

I kept screaming
with the voice of
harbored urgency.

Who had heard me,
as I was leaving
all years behind me?

For time was a delicate,
unapproachable scale
with its magnets
repelling a kind of soul,
misdirected in its
opposing ideals.

I left dust where I
thought gold might be
the presented trade.

It was coal that life
gifted me, as a mere echo
of a step back into grace.

For I was dressed
in all colors, but I had
been heeding just
the harrowing places
of black and white.

The comfort of anticipating
the stagnation, the fear
held me too close, too far
from never remembering
the Hell I called home,
the light I left alone.