Cherished

Cherished am I and that without a doubt
even when ghosts of lost loves rake demons
in clean linen night after night
in the vast caverns of night, of day,
in the nooks and crannies oft lit up, alight,
with moon-candles intricately wrought
brought lovingly from an ancient city
a nightly ritual, forming shadows on wooden crags.

Cherished am I that without a doubt
even when present pain pierces as sunlit shards
through tender weeping eyes into the brain -
with soft words the dark is parted, stilled,
soothes the shadows threatening to recall
that old penultimate friend that rises with the fall
of enchantment - the forbidding D-word
overwhelms clean smooth sheets that envelop,
imprison, incarcerate, immure, entomb.

And oftentimes the cataclysmic catatonic catalepsis
captures beings, suffuses with light
sweeping shadows before it with gale-force,
burning to the edge,
till the past, present and future, are all laid to rest.