Wending

Persephone

I have wandered the open ocean
searching for that definitive
Something
that eludes me.
Nothing out here has spoken to
my spirit in words of wit or wisdom
More clearly than the whistling Winde.
She told me there are worse places to be than at sea.
She sang to me of a Hades lost
beneath the Caribbean;
a forlorn woman trapped in
that lost land.
Winde caressed my face and
showed me myself incarnate,
she showed me my heart and
what I'd done to shred it.
I set sail to find myself, and lost
me in the process.
Aha aha that coarse laugh
of sand upon a shore mocking
my mad dash to identity unknown.
I searched and searched for that
definitive
Something
that continues to elude me.
Yet how can I stop?
Everyone has abandoned me!
The moon scorns my flight with distaste! Night after night she hides
her porcelain face,
gathering her train around her, cursing me
with endless black water.
Everyone has forsaken me!
I cannot recognize this wild hair,
this haggard face, these torn nails,
the desperate taste on my tongue.
I fled the familiar and fawned after the foreign,
following the forlorn into depths unbefore explored.
I lay my body on a pagan altar
hoping some god would at least
hear my incoherent prayer.
No one came.
Still I search.
With a broken conscience I search.
With every inner deficit I search.
Because if the thing I seek does not
run afore me from port to port;
if I fail to fill myself with that
knowledge of myself
I will not have just lost the years
wending on in this black vessel.
If I fail, I lose myself.
And the price I paid for this
loneliness would have been in vain.