Alone...
Hollow...
Ashen.
Life promises only death.

And thus I am again sentenced to solitude,
In silent contemplation, a vision framed in grey
Falls upon world-weary eyes and brings torpor.
The years behind left drained and colourless.

I look within to fan the embers,
Charred and enervated beyond recall to flame.

For so long, I have journeyed, one weary step upon another,
The dust of a decade's failures ground underfoot.

And so I fix my gaze to myriad desolation.
The harsh wind punished a frail simulacra

On the precipice of spiritual oblivion,
Without and within only ashes remain.
As the elements now I shall be.
As one with the enduring stone and the onrushing waters of wild rivers.
As one with the burnished hue of the dawn
And the misty closure of the twilit evenfall.
To cross the foils and Stygian peatfields.
To stride unfeeling towards the eternal periphery.
These bitter lands have borne witness to so much
That I now embrace within a lonely
And burned-out will.

When only distant memories chime across a spiritual vacuum,
The last vestiges of life long since extinguished.
A dying visage whipped by storms charged with the stench of despair.
The entirety of my essence, the nucleus of my humanity now scoured.

I am Bereft.