New Old Days

Composed 6/29/14
Description: After I moved back home after completing my last semester of college, I began to have a hard time writing. I feel like this has something to do with the change in atmosphere. All the things that inspired me as I truly began writing poetry are now gone. I’m much more isolated here in my small town than I was in a larger city amidst a college campus (obviously), and everything is just so… routine. So quiet. So familiar.  And yet I don’t belong in it like I’m supposed to.  And somehow this has robbed me of my words. Even this poem came out with a lot more work than my poems usually do.

My muse let go on the ribbon road
And clings to pink leaves and iced cotton snow
It hides in phantom walks and rains
Sleeping in joys and old heart pains

Now vibrant colors halt at my eyes
While silence surrounds these small town country skies
And even as storms blow gray and wild
My voice shrivels up as a weak frightened child’s

I cannot speak in this peaceful calm
In the lull of unknowing I write no songs
There’s nothing to see, nothing to say
I’m alone and muted in these new old days

In solitude I think myself blind
And meaning hides in the shadows’ bind
It’s all too familiar and a tad amiss
Like a soon ex-lover’s first sweetly forced kiss

This place drains life from my body and words
So I sit, a stunned and silenced bird
And like the red leaves that showered me
So too my words have been crushed to seed

I cannot speak in this peaceful calm
In the lull of unknowing I write no songs
There’s nothing to see, nothing to say
I’m alone and muted in these new old days

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