Hope and fear, pain and change–brothers in arms.
A hope that harms, that sticks needles in your chest and twists,
A light too blinding that it leaves you dizzy, more disoriented than before,
A realization so earthshaking it scatters your fragments.
Some hope is a knife, sharpened in the heat of denial.
The blade gently runs over a hardened scar, delicate, threatening
Until force breaks through the skin and reopens a wound.
The blood is hot and bursting from the seams of misery,
Anguish pushed into the depths and crawling to the surface, begging,
Dying to scream and feel and taste the air.
But it’s just hope, right?
What a beautiful thing, a shred of optimism in times of darkness,
But a load of fresh fruit can snap a donkey’s back.
After decades of starvation, even an immortal’s stomach turns,
Rejecting the abundance of food offered to its hollow and cavernous inside.
After all, they had gotten so used to getting nothing.
Hope is a flood of golden nectar washing the walls,
And it sets old timber on fire, dry angry flames that rear in shock.
Too much, they cry, I liked my cave.
But once they despised the cold stone cage,
At times they wished for nothing but overwhelming sunlight.
Now it arrived too late, after the chill had already set in.
A hope that burns, layers onto burn marks of years past,
A light so sudden that it washes out the familiar dark, the old comfort,
A realization so daring it exposes the nerves.
Hope, one might say, is the most dangerous thing of them all.
