It was Ink

hungry for the earth's head
did you feel me falling into the snow
as it froze?
the black sludge sinking through me,
it dripped through my feet

it was ink.

the leaves were coughing
as I left
and behind me, they sang
to death.
leaping and dancing till
there was nothing left
but themselves. 

Reviews

[Emily B]

these are tall words

[Ed Hart]

i wonder how, i wonder where, i wonder when

[hjcm]

I love the contrast between the vivacity of the personified landscape and the narrator's dwindling sense of his/her own self. As the surroundings teem with a celebration of the raw rite of passage of death, and 'dance', the narrator slips into passivity and obscurity.

Great use of white/black in the first stanza - it shows a kind of breakdown into binary simplicity, until there is only 'ink'; the narrator is just black ink upon white snow, like words (to which meaning cannot be attributed) and common grammatical and punctuation rules.

The order seems like an illogical progression - I would want the white/black imagery to come at the end to symbolise a final dissolution of matter - but that's also part of its charm. There is no linear time, there are no structures that the imagery can be forced into. You have to re-read it and find yourself in its spiral to make sense of it.

Here is a beautiful nihilism.