Annalinde Louw

Ghastly apparitions fly at me from every direction.
My thought-processes have been interrupted since their inception;
I beg them to leave me be; I beg for intermission.
They contrive some sort of fanatical initiation,
but I refuse – although my mind is cluttered, it is still functional.

They fly at me more frantically for my refusal;
let them come at me – I am mighty, and ready to be victorious.
The battle seems overly-laborious
but I know that I have matured:
I am the mind – they must obey me – of that I am assured.

I know that at times like these, my heart, once singed,
must bow to my firey-furious intellect and sense.
I will know, at every occurrence as such, in times hence,
that I am not broken; not ruined; but merely unhinged.

Something in the moonlight foretells of trouble:
an event coming to threaten my stability-bubble;
a happening that would abandon me beneath masses of rubble;
to locate me would be an assignment for the Hubble.

Something in the scent of the air hints at collapse;
this would occur when my Sanity, once again, snaps.
My Sanity is a hotly-contested issue
by the voices within my head (that speak only that which is true).
Then my Sanity debates with them also:
how are the voices informed? He and I want to know.

Sanity and I are friends, acquaintances from years past;
we know all about all about each other,
but the words I spoke to him last
were that his existence depended on the actions of another.
This he could not quite understand –
he was already there; he was, after all, not created by a minion.
I had overplayed my poorly-reinforced hand;
I had caused obstruction between this and the next pinion.

I had said words planted by an authority-grasping boy; irrational -
grappling for control of me like a grounded, desperate fish gasping for air,
he chased me down as a ravenous fox a hare;
my capture and confinement would be simply sensational.

Sensation is something which I definitely am not.
I am hardy and mighty enough with what I fairly and innocently encompass.
He is more interested in things cunningly and dishonestly added to his lot;
his ill-placed influence is one I can not possibly miss.

And so Sanity and I discuss matters far above anyone’s head.
I would rather do so, in any case, than retire to the stifling reclusion of my bed.

Speaking with Sanity is a pastime of mine;
whether I still have any left is neither this side nor beyond the questioning line.

In a distant moment,
somewhere, in a far-off location,
someone orders them to relent:
someone murders another nation.

“We will not lay down and die!”
in anguished hysteria, this they cry.
“We have not struggled so long just to give in!”
They can not imagine that they would not win.
“We have not been injured only to achieve failure!
We will not pretend to condone your behaviour –
we are the masses; the masses are strong.
We won’t be beaten- you know you are wrong!”

In the midst of all the manic confusion,
slowly, someone is crushed- is it illusion?

Amid pointless political debate and bickering,
a lone mother, dusty and mournful, proceeds to sing
a song of loss, of death, of emptiness;
for her young was trampled by the indignant masses.

A question spirits into her very soul:
“Who will be blamed for this?”
She walks away. The greyness clouding her existence is
weighed down by her knowledge of the unimportance of her lost one’s role:
he is now equated to the statistical increment of the ever-rising death-toll.