All Drowned Out

I often feel grief
Like an eighth and final continent
An island set to tropical time.
It is a place held away from self,
With short and brittle correspondence
Of letters in jars
From a faraway place.

They speak another language there,
An unfamiliar farce of words
And swirling tongues.
It’s a bitter dance of seething syllables,
Spoken like a slow and steady breath.

My Idling archipelago
Rambles like a train of mismatched
Thoughts,
Only ever in halves.

I feel my grief like
A plentiful drought
And as searing eyes,
Caught on my neck.
I feel it like a dragging and pulling
Farther and farther down.
Like a dapper fool or a loathsome clown;
A starcrossed parade
Of players and heathens.

I have kept my grief apart from my heart
Made it a faint, and witching voice.
It welcomes the hour’s thud,
And relieves my daily dose.
A gesture of hope,
Hid from the start.