A Gilded Life: Reflections after 20 Days in Mariupol

The time had come to see a body lie, 

A shoe, pooled in blood, empty on the floor. 

A thought occurred, led to a written place, 

Where now I sit with caustic thoughts

Wasting this time that has to pass 

Wracking my mind for possibilities. 

And what are all the possibilities?

And where do Ukrainian people lie? 

The hordes of common people pine to pass,

I enclosed in that moral floor,

Bellowing silent selfish thoughts, 

Loathing my breath in this protected place. 

Had they not remained in that adverse place 

Had they to live that possibility? 

And for their doom I am lost in thought 

Feeding self with desperate lies, 

Scraping earth, mankind’s ravished floors,

Hoping that their memory won’t pass. 

And of this poem, that will surely pass? 

And what of this lingual contemplation? 

A surface to rebuild a founding floor

And find a possibility 

In that long-told, important lie: 

Pens rebuild toppled masonry in thought. 

They linger ruined, devoted ruckus thoughts. 

Ones that cannot fade, ones that cannot pass, 

Entrenched in memory. Forced lying 

That waits for tranquil time and place 

To rebuild possibilities 

And aspire beyond this poetic floor. 

I rest like bloodied laces, sullen and floored

Where I will recycle obsessive thoughts 

And ransack whole the possibilities

Hoping to find a place to pass

The foreign trauma to a place 

Their yellowblue may unforgotten lie. 

I will gift them to my spirit's floor, they won't pass, 

And I will survey my thoughts, eye my gilded place, 

And forward lie with them in possibilities.