Suicide

It is my life to make of what I will,
or can in any given moment, although
the darkness in that shrivelled creep
contains me, often, holding tight

with bony fingers of fear, clutching
at the edges of my sanity, playing
with the frayed fringes of mind,
teasing, taunting, calling me to be

other than what I am, drawing me on
and through, the valleys which
huddle beneath soaring mountains
of possibility that I fear to climb,

for I might fall, and drown in that
great ocean of sky which threatens
to engulf me in waves of imaginings,
as if I were a young eagle, feather-

fluffed on a first, timid, unexpected
flight, flung from rocky outcrops
of cold reality; avalanched into
eternity, crumbling down through

thundering dreams and nightmares,
careering in a pebbled dance of
probability; scattering at last in
silence, far below where I began,

leaving only shreds of myself and
broken pieces of my life, waiting
to be brought together in mosaic,
by all those I had left behind

and to whom I offered my ending
and my beginning to make of it
what they would, while I soar
high above on shining wings.

In memory of a friend and others who have chosen the same path.