Sink, if you must, in the slough of despond.
Make your one and only being
victim to the universal reasons for despair.
I choose a level ground, carrying
my own blood-red lacerations
over my allotted landscape.
I refuse to contaminate the country
of your face, your deep, zaftig voice
that drives my ardor beyond the bleak.
Music is not a primer for evasion,
that handy cloak to sheath the thousand
wounds that scar the soul and bone.
And yet, as the shapely notes invade
my viscera I willingly succumb,
a prisoner elevated, tasting the stars.
*this is the third and final in a three-day series of poems The Opiate is publishing by Peggy Aylsworth. Read Day 1 here and Day 2 here.
The Slough of Despond — wonderful, thanks. So I’m not the last person alive to have read Pilgrim’s Progress.