Far off.
Somewhere.
In the open white
That tears holes in the sky
A shatter echoes off the walls of the earth
Broken windows
With glass raining red
And the echo reaches him here, somehow
He can't move
His legs have rooted themselves into the permafrost
And he's become Galanthus
The snowdrop with eyes that betray their blue
No more camouflage for him
He's a naked petal, exposed, at least he feels this way
The cold feels closer now
Because everything he's ever feared
And known
And wanted
Has huddled into one another, seeking warmth
In this frozen circle of Hell; but finding unity instead
An avalanche of emotions summoned by an artillery song
Tumbling down a mountain slope of fate
Where he's at the bottom
Waiting; because there's no escaping this
There's a man lying in the snow
Staining innocence a perfect shade of remorse
And pain – don't forget the pain
Because there's no way around it
The agony has set up a blockade, where no relief may come in
And no one can come out
And he's a prisoner, shackled to his own fucking destruction
Where he wishes he could remember the man's name, how to speak
Finally,
A whisper in the snow
That crawls into his mind
And gives birth to sound
He opens his mouth
At first it is slow, it has forgotten how to speak
Frozen by the cold grip of reality, how cruel it can be
And the origin of a breakdown is born – MEDIC!
It is not ugly, nor beautiful
Not like the poets like to tell him
Nor does it sound like footsteps or the shattering window
That he heard somewhere, sleeping in the crevices of time
It's a quiet widening of fissures
Those tight-lipped cracks that deceive the unveiled eye
They tell their secrets now
Of a man dying – on the brink of his fall
And one last salute
To the men who keep his heart in their patches, their snow-stained uniforms
His wisdom, his every word, in vaults of memories
Behind eyes that have seen too much for even the world to bear
So why should they be expected to bear it?
The numbed hands, they slide out of their slots of surrender at his side
Shaken, breaking, the cracks are gashes bleeding stone now
The mark of a Soldier, of a man hiding from the fire raining sky
The helmet reveals the Man underneath – armistice lying at his feet
Sheltered croons, husks of cries
Of the wounded, of the promised dead
He doesn't know, all he hears is the sound
Of sound itself
Trying to find his ears underneath all that numbness
So it can sink in, so it can all occur to him, an epiphany
As blinding as light
That it's all over for him – no more fear of snow-bank tomorrows
And yet he is here,
Somehow,
The Soldier who plays cards and darts with his men
Who rips up pictures of the girl that wrote her last goodbyes
Who sleeps next to the man he used to be,
Praying to the darkness
To let him fade away into memory's shadow
Back into yesterday
Shed the Soldier's hardened skin
And find the Man again
He raises his arm
A salute, not his last
He'll be back again, he thinks,
But tomorrow knows better
Where he will lie on a cot, on his side,
A voice weaving with the words of a letter
That never felt so plastic against his fingers
But they're brittle, cracking beneath the crushing snare of flesh - just like him.
And the gashes
They slip a little further into oblivion.
Into decay.
Footnotes: Back after a few revisions and such. I don't know why I didn't just edit it and then update it, but I guess deleting it turned out to be a bad idea. :P