This went all kinds of wrong. For hours. It's a "Golden Shovel" form - the end of each line together becomes an Easter egg of a completely different poem. This afternoon it wanted to be iambic pentameter, and it was going fine until it broke me.
I gave up and did this version in free verse (because sleep has been all too absent anyway this week already). Bonus points for getting the stanza and poet that inspired it before the end:
~~~
This is the way of all things that we do
This is the mask of those we do not
That final touch that lets you go
Hurts. However slow, it's never gentle.
Here is the darkness I descend into
A clammy veil over all that
Comforts or delights - all that's good
I'm in that suffocating noonday midnight.
I know this feeling well of old
Experience enough for twice my age
"Call yourself a poet?! You should
Have written of that cold burn
By now" - the absence of your hand.
Without its shape I ape the brave,
Find other monsters to run at
Shout louder when you come close.
(She says: "What are you afraid of?"
"Guilt: that maybe if I saw her today
She'd be just a stranger from another age.")
I still have the capacity for rage
A flame to cup against
The cold and dark - a spark - the
Warmth that still leaks from embers dying.
And never mind what I'm guilty of -
I'll alchemise pain; from your unchanging love, mother,
I've made a raging light.
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