If Any Vigor Remains

05 December 2025

https://poems.culturing.net/2025/12/if-any-vigor-remains/

I came to them not with hope but with fury.
They welcomed me, at least at first. Was it all
a part of some sinister plan, a demonic machination,
or were those demons in me all along? Is it fair
to see demons in others, but not always true?
My demons were stronger than life itself, and I sought
to remove them by any means necessary. What
were they thinking, to offer a refuge, a place
where even demons are welcome? It was folly from the start,
or something worse, a case of pathological arrogance.

And yet somehow it worked, and I rose
from the fires of hell into new life, forged
by those fires and never forgetting their heat.
I have scars to remind me, and memory works
like a flame, disabusing old, dead beliefs,
but not burning the live ones, so full of invigorating sap.
Among the dead I see childish desires and teenage dreams,
a longing to make the world safe, which can never come true.

Now my thoughts turn to you and whoever you are.
I have come so far and I gather that you have too.
There may still be some sap left inside us,
some hope for another new life, worked out
by these fires and the spasms of time, to remind us
that where we have come from is where we are going,
that all life returns to the center, the source,
and that even this energy is not less than sacred.
Tomorrow is what it will be, and today we find wholeness
not in ourselves, but in what those selves could become.

But what can they become? What can any once dead
ever hope to become? There is light, if you see it,
beyond the horizon, both under the skin and in between stars,
which confirms who we are. It's another lost dream, one more
reverie, this time tethered to objects worthy of praise.
Underneath, all is changed, and the sky fills with wonder
and love as new light rushes in. It's a love that stands firm,
not forgetting the heat of the flame or the storm-tossed waves,
but combining them, here, in this heart, which can answer
the deepest longing and give shape to pain that otherwise overwhelms.
It's this love that the lost can become if with courage
they stand their ground in the crucible of life and death,
if their hope is not conquered, and if any vigor remains.

They let me be childish, that was their folly
and their appeal, for I was not ready to stand
and bear my own weight. But in time I grew stronger,
and they, I'm afraid, did not. Once time came
to reap the harvest sown years before
there was nowhere to go but down, through the depths
of unconscious longing, the archetypes of despair. I was there,
I remember, and whether any other has grown more aware
through my presence, or whether they still wander on
through the night of impermanent dreams, I can say
I am free, and let these things be, as a testament
to what was destroyed and forever destroyed, but which rises
again and again in every mother's loving arms. There is no
final cure, for the answer is to ask the question again,
in a reproduction, a false half-double of me,
born out of the strength I have earned. But a child must be childish
and so must outgrow the childhood cast upon it.

I am not at the end, not quite, but somewhere
in the middle, awake but still dreaming, alive
but not sure that life really is good. Could it be
that my meaning is out there, under the stars, where gods
and heroes struggle to carry the light of day? Or is it
in here, in my heart? I know where to start,
and, I think, where things end. So long, friend.
I have told you the way. If you take it is your decision.