Where went the black dog growling darkness
draggin bones through the dirt
as grim reminders, chewed and spat out?
Where now, all the tears that tasted sweet in their sourness?
None would ever know the delicious ache
of kneeling on broken glass.
Where are the hands that suffocated
throughout the night, to silence
the dreams of the missing, the dead?
Where is the pain that stabbed
the hearts of youth and beauty
emptying complications out into the world?
Where is the silence that numbed the tortures
expecting execution, the void of sound;
stark streetlights in a nothing-nowhere town.
Where did all those nightmares go running
once the heart had been found?
Where did this nostalgia form for the hells that made the man?
Shared with dVerse MTB Ubi sunt.
As I read some other poems submitted for this prompt, I felt that there was too much sad nostalgia for the past (which is pretty much the remit of the prompt, I know), but I wanted to try and turn it around. My youth was often filled with depression and darkness, something which, with the help of medication and age, occurs less often these days.
Yet why do I sometimes miss that darkness that I struggled through, that made me who I am today?
Stanzas 1 and 2 are non-specific but stanza 3 references my father, who died when I was 18 months old and so I never knew him. At age 4, the idea of death hit me so hard that I cried myself to sleep one night. Stanza 4 references getting tattooed and pierced and revelling in the pain. Stanza 5 is specifically about a time in my bedroom, high on amphetamines, looking out across the grim spectacle of suburbia at 3 am, unable to sleep.
The title I know from a line in a song (though I forget which) that I often listened to in my youth but I think originated from during or post-WWII.
1994ever 