Guest Feature: Ghosts Amid The Ivy ~ Edward Cates

Outsiders could never begin to understand
The majestic consciousness we created
As they hiss and pass by our forsaken ruin
Its ramparts wreathed in dark somber ivy

They have no memories of its halcyon age
When it thrummed with vision and vitality.
They cannot know the electric ecstasy of
Our magnificent creations coming to life,

Our minds spanning epiphanic galaxies,
Both resplendent and terrifying in their
Stark and wildly addictive poetic intensity.
They have not felt their souls inflamed,

Chasing the inspiration of fragrant words,
Our utterances fueling each other’s fires
We dreamed together a conjoined dream
And constructed a world to carry our spirits

Beyond the limits of mortal constraints
Together forging a winged chimeric soul
Made half from her words and half mine,
Stronger and more alive than either of us,

Our manifesto soared in conflagrant flight
And mocked the paltry heat of stellar fire.
Oft I wonder if our spiritual amalgamation
Has taken with it our wisdom and sanity.

For it left us locked in this ivy bound tower,
Where we pine, gazing out at the heavens
Behind time grizzled bars and nitrous walls
At its atomic tail streaking like a fiery comet

Blazing across the robe of the firmament
Transcribing dreams onto heaven’s scroll
While we languish in unyielding shackles.
The ivy knows as it hugs the prison’s bars.

The ivy sees. It hears. It whispers and weeps.
Perhaps the ivy too is an inmate here like us
Tracing the aged battlements that it wreaths
Reaching toward us in living verdant silence.

Our creature saw the unfolding of the curse
It took wing and flew leaving only memories
That we cannot recall but that grip our souls
With a shudder of unexplainable disquietude.

The ivy’s tendrils conceal the ancient scars
That echo our regrets on the aging timbers.
Perhaps neither this ancient sagging edifice
Or the melancholy ivy are meant to be free.

Only the ghost of our shared dreams knows,
But it has departed this achromatic twilight
To grander and more vibrant dreamscapes,
But we are condemned to lachrymal decay

©All original work copyright Edward D Cates 2018

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