Day 22 - "to a diamond"

Greetings and salutations everyone, on this spookiest of holidays!

It's been a busy year, to put it extremely lightly, but once again I've found myself in the comfortable, lazy bosom of one of my favorite days - Halloween. A time for scares, chills, and all things nightmarish. Besides that, it's also a day I have off from work, so that's a plus, and it's also the reason why I've actually got a little time to myself to do some blogging and post up a new poem for my dedicated readers out there in the digital world of pleasing procrastination.

I was going to post one of my more frightening pieces today in honor of the holiday, but there's a certain poem I'd written recently that I'd really wanted to post for a while and, in it's own way, is a pretty scary one itself.

I wrote this poem in a very Thomas Hardy "Convergence of the Twain" sort of mood. Often in my life, my mind will drift into a sort of state where it doesn't see an object on its own - whatever it may be - instead, I tend to see beyond the object and everything it's been through to get there and become what it is - the beautiful erosion of experience carving into the limestone block of primordial forms. In this case, I'd recently watched a movie called "Lord of War" starring Nicholas Cage, and one of the last scenes in the movie really struck me - where his brother died trying to save a small village of Africans who were doomed to die regardless of their actions, and the price of this genocide was a pile of glittering stones on a makeshift tabletop set on top of several boxes of grenades.

That such small things - such strange little objects - could be the cause of such misery and drama millions of years later after their formation - the only thing setting them aside from the rest of the dirt and stones around them being the value placed on them by our imaginations; the thought of it really struck me deeply. What is a diamond, really, besides what we make it? What is anything, really, when it comes down to it? Our economy itself, for all intents and purposes, is a widely accepted fabrication. Things of this world carry worth because it is we who deem them worthy - we dream the majesty of kings and, in our minds, if we, the creations, did not know of our Creator, who would be there to know of him and offer him glory?

Anyway, these are just the ramblings of an overstuffed brain that's been reading too much Joseph Campbell and Jack Kerouac, but I digress. I leave you all to the poem and hope you enjoy the late-Victorian style that I am a very large fan of. Perhaps as well you'll grasp the desperate scariness of it that I did slightly while writing it but, like all good horror stories, I believe the weight of its horror is one that slowly sinks in over time after considering the cryptic lines in cold-sweat recollections... insidious little bastard, ain't I? haha

To all of you out there, my fabulous readership: I wish you a wonderful, spine-chilling, and safe Halloween this year!


"to a diamond"


Had you an inkling, little stone -
The value of your translucent hide?

In eons, waiting in the ground
Did gambits ever cleave your mind?

Knew you then of silk white hands?
Of tribal wars and sanguine desires?

Did then you grasp your catalyst
To tender man’s soul unto hellfires?

Or were you innocent; unknown to this?
Name given to that which flows through veins -

Damned then and forever a Helen of Troy
To witness thousands of witless aims.

Yet perhaps you knew nothing of this all along
And ‘tis useless still to question urns:

Where nothing’s held but echoed sound;
Who’d stare in silence as we’d burn.

But if not for thee, what would we be
Without a muses’ sheen to prize?

In yielding to thee, cold, lifeless stone
You’ve granted purpose to our lives.


- Josh Clarke