Fishers' Tourniquet

Of all the tales told and stories passed and whispered by word of mouth, the unholy things and hollow paths hidden in my haunted heart tear apart the simple minds and safe places to whom love conveys and hope imparts. Stuck, sunken deep in distant dark, resides the body I've kept so secret. Buried beneath sun's reach and warm embrace dwells the tantalizing taint of soul's collusion with learned hate, and here I stand corroded and irate, kind words and cool breath withering steadily like wilting petals drifting off a worn and jagged tongue. Harbinger I become.

Harrower and happy reaper of ignorant bliss, corrupted and clothed in a butterfly kiss, I roam the world aimless in futile search for heart's remiss. The key to the heart is forged in one's own soul, and life entails the inner plight to unite capacity and compassion in our mortal hours and dreamless nights of fractioned whole and portioned ration amidst our quest for the ascertained divine.

So what if for one moment I catch myself in a solar flare, and in a bright blighted instant my body tears from the sickness sewn in marrow and bone? The shadow erupts from its volcano home but stays readily sealed in luminous heights? Tucked in neatly just under the epidermis, deep-seeded dark-service tourniquets, a shadow personifies in the mind of man: savage, sentient, all the dark particles solidified as violent waters sooth uncertain sands. Semi-conscious partitioner and sanguine parishioner of ideas detained and duly guarded within the handcuffed hells of arrested thought, the shadow cackles as I ask my shadow-self, "What fish hath the fisher caught?"

With little nuance he quickly replies, "Who plays the fish, you or I?"