PRISON-MIST

The mist now suddenly, surprised, stretches over dark rows of houses, Like a visible spider's web: a universal thick vapour. I am a little bitterer than last summer, and more selfish! I have rebelled many a time to-day against a compulsion that chokes me and breaks me: I am the messenger of my moods in pessimism: Carrying emotions with me! 

My fortress of loneliness and fear's bastion! I would go in search of new shores of Atlantis, where humanity's humanism of human peace rests! And, beckoning the little orphan, the child mocked for a simpleton, I would bend my oppressed head in the shelter of comforting laps, 

that comforts me and inspires me to hope. Even the sunset is now a tyrant, With burning flames, with chariots of fire, Painting on the sky its strange cosmos-signs. It churns the hypersensitive tunnels of my stomach with excessive anxiety for the unknown uncertainties of tomorrow! And like some wretched beast of man I have built myself into a cuddling prison of shadows!

Suddenly the pitch-black majesty of winter, Surprising myself, broke upon me, shattered my possibilities: the surging cauldron of autumn's frost Froze in the asphalt sea of pavements, And formed a petrified mirror-palace, an unbreakable armour: Legs and vertebrae - surely, it may be, easily dislocated! The world has become the preening lust of crows: human law is nothing here! They gloat in their self-pleasure; they gorge themselves with ugly disgust! Man himself forgets that Hope is vulnerable!