Himalayas

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

Grim and ragged and undulating
is the landscape of the no hoper's soul.
It is as pitted as a potato rotting in the ground,
as lopsided as the once benevolent grin
of a former fair-weather friend
bearing a gaudy package
of lovingly gift-wrapped violence.
As he ogles the pretty his skull is broken
under a flurry of vicious blows
from the collective fists of supposed allies,
and as he falls his bones are pulped with sturdy branches
wielded by the old one and co,
that dark conglomerate
of unknown, unknowable strangers.

Helplessly he surveys
vista upon vista of wicked crags,
razor edges interspersed
with deep, sombre depressions.
The unfamiliar landscape both beckons and torments
the dumb doppelgänger
incarcerated beneath his battered brow,
and the barren territory that no living soul can map
where he has unwittingly lost himself
seems utterly without end.

A cruel gust lifts him up into the heavens
with the joyous birds -
just for a laugh, he reckons -
and the mute bastard that no one else can see,
a silent ghoul with the blue filmed eyes of a dead fish
glares at him malevolently
before dropping his still living corpse back to earth
with a sickening crunch.
'Ho hum,' he thinks,
eyeing his ruined armour.
His limbs are arranged into impossible angles,
he is numb and defeated, and he aches
for the bloodied sunrise that will bring
the axe man, the inevitable death knell
of this ugly, unforgiving mother of long nights.

Come morning at long last he realises
that the tattered flag he was convinced
the enemy waved to guide him towards
the waiting jaws of a well-oiled trap
might well be his salvation.
All he has to do is give it his all,
all that's expected is for the curmudgeon
to run his tired heart out
towards the invisible finishing post
where a log fire is doubtlessly burning
and a fair maiden might well be preparing
a banquet fit for a king.