gray

Brilliant lights cascade and I a silent gray. Surrounded in prismatic flash of dance and song, stuttering halting blind.  Breathless in the flood of the other and the fire.  Drowning with feeble limbs and the loss of forward.  As the night cannot survive hyperionic gaze, so my dim flesh burns under your eye.  Imposter! Foul poisoner of light! Sink and never find surface, you cry, lest we suffer your tainted shade.

I cannot drink the brilliant water but it feasts on me.  Laughing teeth, starspun pearl, tearing and ripping.  Merriment aglow tatters and tears my corpse.  I am the alien, in lands of promise, promised to another.  All others.  I can hear the echos of the vow and the pleasure, and it is pronounced curse in my tongue.  That which builds the rainbow light spins me dry and haggard.  Sucking life through bone-sheathed marrow.

And the race outpaces my dying pace.  Stormed and swallowed by the chaos of life, I see no track; I find no trail.  And in my fade, one is all, and spatters my mind to the tide.  Awash.  And I long for the night's shore, my home of beginning but my home of no more.  To rest in the sand, drowned and silent and cooling, finally.

What is my hope in the world of edgéd light?  Where is the safe vessel?  I am the gray in promise arch of peace.  Can you find me?