TOMORROW WILL SHINE BRIGHTER

TOMORROW WILL SHINE BRIGHTER

No one matches me in sorrow, I win hands down in misery.
I sleep in trepidation, awash in ancient history,

Trapped inside an anguished heart, feeling lost and anxious,
Shadowboxing with the ghouls that lie in wait to ambush.

I carry in my wallet a Tarot card of doom,
And in my house the hands of death have fingered every room.

They turn the chairs to skeletons, the couch into a gargoyle,
My dreams they lie in the desert sun, the barren rocky soil.

And yet an angel chorus rehearses and grows stronger,
Tomorrow will shine brighter, child, weep and pine no longer.

Trapped in bitter warfare, my dark side and my light,
Engage in their one-upmanship, a bitter, dirty fight.

I suffer so exquisitely, anticipating ruin,
A dark and dismal pessimism to be my great undoing.

I carry in my pockets the accoutrements of woe,
And stake my claim to psychic pain that echoes to and fro.

I tremble in a solitude that soaks me through and through,
Like a heavy soaking rain washing down the avenue.

I'm beside myself in bitterness, paralyzed by fear,
Oblivious to my blessings and the friends I hold so dear.

No one matches me in sorrow, I win hands down in misery,
I sleep in trepidation, awash in ancient history.

Yet I light a torch in darkness and my spirit starts to glow,
I see a future tentative and it beckons me to follow.

The candlelight sublime increases, growing ever stronger,
Tomorrow will shine brighter, child, weep and pine no longer.

-Bruce Potts
Revised Copyright 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

How like me, how like us all,
To forget our life before the Fall,
To keep the memory of each mistake,
To mind the dregs and forget the great.

I once held a sleeping bird in my arm,
Fragile and so very sweet,
It trembled lost for just awhile,
And then surrendered to its sleep,

I once rescued a teddy bear,
At least that's what they tell me.
A teddy bear being tossed by bullies,
I did my best to set it free.

Still sometimes I feel so worthless,
Fodder for the cobwebs and the dark black alleys.
How like me, how like us all,
To forget the peaks and mind the valleys. 

I once helped a drunken man to his shuffling feet,
His body crumpled sleeping in the middle of my street.
I gave him a lift to a 7-Eleven, he called his son on the pay phone.
Hopefully he was taken in and found his way back home.
Some darkness falls in every life, with grace its humble midwife,
We remember the sordid brothels, forget the bright boutiques,
How like me, how like us all, to cling to the valleys, forget the peaks.

Now I am lost to Parkinson's and a slave to failing health,
A bully of another sort who operates with a wondrous stealth.
Who creeps around the back alleys here in my mind,
Crippling the body, with methodical decline,
Counting down the days with an arm as rigid as a pipe,
Lucky for the disappearing art of committing words to type.

I have some high school glory days that I vaguely recall,
A college life of some achievement, friends still with me through it all,
A lover who I'll cherish until the day I perish.
Sometimes, though, the good times go by in such a blur,
I remember my sweet mother, I still can treasure her.
Still sometimes i'm so bereft that I can barely stand,
Painful memories weave a web, I am trapped within the strands.
When thoughts are so undisciplined, they compel a soul to kneel,
And conjure up a deep, dark future, gray and funereal.
Like the layers of an onion they begin to slowly peel.

How like me, how like us all, to strike ourselves upon the head,
To weep as in a deep, dark sleep, to wish that we were dead.
To remember every lost ideal and every second wind forget,
To always ponder all the things that we have not done yet.

I once held a sleeping bird in my arms,
Fragile and so very sweet,
It shook with a mighty tremor,
Then sighed and fell asleep.
When it awoke, it flew away,
High into the clouds of a brand new day.

Why then do I still feel worthless,
Fodder for the cobwebs and the dark black alleys.
How like me, how like us all,
To forget the peaks and mind the valleys.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED