John Biscello

Everyone’s dark

is coming up

and it isn’t going to be pretty,

as well it shouldn’t be.

Beauty, as a rugged force,

as thorny swaths of dream-thistles,

blooms through night-fasting,

and respiring enclosures of dark.

Beauty

marks the hidden faith

of the smallest hours,

of gongs

and nocturnes tolled.

Everyone’s dark,

ribbed and torn,

is coming up,

for far too long

too many hearts, quivering

and clamped,

were held in locked jaws,

too many tongues

bitten down on repeatedly,

words, martyred to pink,

drowned in spitless blood,

a gag order bonded

to shame’s conditions.

All those Orphic songs,

unsung, hemmed between

dusty, hidden margins,

they are coming up,

neo-goth, angel-punk, dream-folk,

savagely sunned yawps,

and as tenderest shoots

baring for glean, they will need love,

lots and lots of love.

Everyone’s Ophelia,

rebirthing into moon-haunted

witches, no longer

pale whispers of shackled waifs,

no longer the mirror image

of some man’s drowned double

fantasy-girl,

pearlescently preserved

in grave, brackish water,

 no, all the Ophelias

are reforming to mount wolves

aimed, with furious love,

at the molten center

of the heart

of a brand-new dawn,

a claim unbridled.

Everyone’s dark

is rising

and what that means

will be different

for each person.

Yet the heart,

fathomless

in its storied and ancient infancy,

understands clearly

that dark, ceded to light,

finds its own level,

heavening its roots

in fertile ground,

growing lucid

 through unfettered praises.