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Incarceration of Conscience
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Author:
SanExpeditus
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| Created: August 10, 2012 at 07:57 am |
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Entry Type:
Poem, G (All)
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| Category: Dark | Free Verse | Free Verse |
| Entry Stats: 5 Stars by 8 users with 9 comments 216 views |
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Incarceration of Conscience 
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Reprieve comes sweetly only in dreaming,
the saccade of eyes, untroubled, behind lids
that finally surrender from dark day watching.
A distracted moon lingers by the corner of
the grille in her faithful sweep of a sky bruised
by my longing, a company reluctant to deviate
in her slow passing, the translucent segments
of lunar empathy amid the throng of clouds,
unconcerned, a midnight caravan of cumulus
keen to advance beyond pity. I awake,
bolted upright, the hand of conscience that
relishes a rough arousal ever-present in this pit,
it’s bony fingers pointing to my misdemeanors
smeared upon the walls of this pulsing chamber,
an abiding reminder, arrogant with righteousness
and ready to smite the selective recollections of
this worthless convict, ‘manu propria’. Yet, what
use be despair? Within these walls? Remorse,
a more worthy inmate to shadow around the inside
of a perimeter patrolled by vigilant retribution,
better my eyes fixed to the back of a virtuous
frame which will lend me an education of
sustenance succeeding a possible forgiveness.
Ceaseless is the sound of silence filled with
a high-pitched dwelling inside my ears, a
head crammed with screaming, yet my voice
remains buried and unprotesting, a mute slave
loyal to the truth interred with me in this tomb.
I drag the weight of it around this stinking well,
my willful foot pulling an unpaid debt through
these sands of time, contours of consequence
hardening as the sedimentary pain of another,
the rectitude of one now a cumbersome
terrain for I, the transgressor, to travel in
search for an absolution. And what of
family? Flesh and bones, now sticks and
stones from participants in the arena of ignorant
whispering, my parting gift, their clobber of shame
to be worn in garments I long my neck to be
weighted upon. Yet, the prayers of my mother
ooze through the cracks of my banishment, her
perpetual succour penetrating unworthiness
and the coldness of bones, alike. Daylight is a
murky shaft of contemplation, a grey beam
that moves in darkening circles inside my
heart, from the sliver of dawn’s first-moment
consciousness, to evening’s elongated shadow
of all-day tormented thinking. Madness teases
me from beyond the confines of yard-thick sanity,
I hear its muffled beckoning, seducing me with
the comfort of an admission to incapacitation,
but my conscience will not relent to such perjury.
Humility, now, is the only hope for the parole
of my spirit… until then, I will serve my time
with gratitude for the experience of suffering.
Last Modified: August 10, 2012 at 07:59 am
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Author Notes
Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’, this write attempts to express the incarceration of one’s mind following an examination of conscience, the inability to escape the prevailing memory of the past, suggesting that ‘imprisonment’ can be as much about the spirit as it can be, the body.
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SanExpeditus
August 15, 2012
(Creator)