Algea

POEM: P-02 · Algea 2024 · 20 lines · 5 stanzas

perpetual as luminescent night
it permeates my body and my heart
for sweet relief, I long and yearn and fight
yet desolation rips my life apart.

oh, how I wish I could just convalesce
and spend my days without a single woe
yet, laying in my bed, I evanesce
as I'm rained down upon by bitter snow.

yes, every day I spend in whitewashed rooms
and out of them, despondent, I emerge
machinery foretelling my own doom
and strangers, wearing labcoats, sing my dirge.

I cry, I beg, I wish on every star
the ephemeral echoes, hear my plea
oh, why am I so flawed? I've come so far
please take away this burning agony.

I fade into the iridescent sky
my shackles gone, I close my eyes and fly.

Annotations

Title: Algea (Greek: Ἀλγεα) — the personifications of pain, grief, and sorrow in Greek mythology, daughters of Eris. The poem takes their name as a diagnosis.

Stanza 3: whitewashed rooms — hospital rooms; the machinery as oracle, the labcoats as a chorus singing a dirge.

Stanza 5: the final couplet — the release. The iridescent sky as the place where pain finally becomes light.

Evolution

Written in 2019 during a prolonged period of illness. The poem went through three drafts; the final stanza was originally four lines but was compressed to a couplet to mirror the suddenness of release.

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