Gleeful Despair: a prose poem

You tell me this is a time of gleeful despair, and I can’t tell if that means you are happily sad, or mournfully joyful.

Perhaps there lies a darkened hallway where the only lightened room has its doorway locked shut, and you stand on the carpet outside, dancing in the blackness regardless.

Perhaps the demons have handed you their sharpened arrows meant to pierce your future wide open, yet you dodge their cutting blows, allowing the scars to become your mapped roadways away from the bloodied stories they offer you.

Or although the trees in the window sway barren and lifeless in the cold, you wait patiently like the buds clinging to their sides, knowing in time a spring must come.

You tell me this is a time of gleeful despair, a time my faltering mind must rely upon this miserable ecstasy among the war this virus has thrust upon us, a time to join hands through the pixels of history as we all sit alone together.

So I bring out my candle in the darkened carpeted hallway to dance with you, dance away the night as we read our scars to guide us to our futures in the dawning light, the buds clinging to the branches in the window above us, waiting for the spring to come.

1–22–22

Tansy Julie Soaring Eagle Paschold