New Poem: Growing Up

Growing Up
by A.R. Carter

When my demons fall

I weep with relief,

excised of the gangrene

of youthful bad permission,

my conscience leaden with deep-six freedom

from the lonely, poisonous things

that I summoned long ago

out of curiosity, and a strong constitution,
thinking myself immortal.

Now, death has swept by too often,
I have felt her wings too close;
then she takes another,
and I count in thankfulness
my hard and merciless virtues.

The moral stanch of silence 

stops my heart’s bleeding.

Silence here is warm and full of sun-dust,

rippled only by the trains' insistent schedule.

My silence is like the smell of bread,

simple and richer than Solomon.

Incensed by peace, 

the beasts of boredom

shriek at my nothing affluence

pleading for a fresh finite vein

to bite into and suckle.

But for sanity’s sake,

my bitter cold breastplate has no time

for whines and bipolar tears.

And my own smug nothing cries, 

empty within

trading compassion for sanity,

a profit-loss deal negating all sin

which my badly glued heart 

cannot fathom.

Without compassion,

and new emptiness,

the creations of youth are gone.

The child of my music can’t return

though it must,

with my heart in hand;

ears set against the buzz

of the fens of mediocrity,

stubbornly punting

across the Styx of my tears

to shores 

of transcendent change.

Glencoe, Western Highlands