Taps for a lonely room

Dark lights,
        shutters over the heart, shudder, while
        soft music
        plays taps to old feelings, moments, being renewed.
                (all from within
                 and all so real, almost too real to be relived
                 again, but impossible to deny life.) 

I am here now
        seeing myself a thousand times
        in one,
        scared at what could be forever.
Rocking in the cradle of misery self-made.
Enfolded within blankets without shelter
        from noise, sight, experience or pain.
Tenderness pricks my heart
to cause profuse, uncontrollable bleeding.  Hemophiliac biologically i am not
                                                          but emotionally?
                                                          emotionally, there is no cure for this?
                                is this life?  river of sorrow and pain,
                                of memories not quite true
                                which still remain too true and too poignant
                                for bleeding flowers?  white carnation, why look so sad?
live    live                            
  &     &
grow.   grow.   grow thorns if need be.  adapt to what comes to come again.

Taps flow by through pain
        they know too well, over beds worn down by use.
        it is not the end of that mournful wail that comes
        but the beginning.
        i have heard it all before.
        and will hear it all again.
        it never ends.
Bugler, bugler
        please give my heart a rest.  That song of yours tears
        through my walls of stone and pierces my inner makings.
        No thorns of mine aid in defense.

Dark rooms
        travel through my life
        where i sit to weep and where
        music plays at the rhythms of my ups and downs.
        Here in closed chambers,
        behind concrete walls, tears lead to the bottom of my soul--            
                                        a bottomless pit,
        which yet still i try to fill
        so that the end which can't come, will come.
        does this all make sense to you?
        flesh of flesh and weathered eyes
        repeatedly ask for the reasons and are turned away
        by silence.
        Silence too must greet you.  There is no place for understanding this.

i open my door
        for a moment
        and there outside too is a fire ablaze, burning all within its grasp.
        flowers, thorns and all scream in pain.
        will it spread to me?  and devour what little i have left?

i close the door
        only to open it again
        and see beyond my scorched petals
        to others in bloom with happiness.
                where is mine?  or is it that when it is before me,
                my window dirtied with age-old pain and memories
                reveals only that which i already know and expect?

                where is life?  my life?  is it this which is before me?
        dark chambers exhaling interminable songs of pain,
        shuttered windows and shutered hearts
        and taps played to taps for a lonely room of one.
        taps played to taps played to taps
        in a dark, lonely room.

The smell of burning flesh,     
        the knowledge of burnt hopes, destroyed desires and suffocating pain
        force me to once again retreat to my icy chambers.
                        where is my home?
                        where is my song of life?
        it is here mournfully wailing its tale of woe self-made.

here i am now
        seeing myself suffering a thousand-fold
        scared at what is to be forever.  misery self-made.
        locked chambers of the heart.
        burning walls of pain, and the march of life
        to the taps of death.
        lonely room of my lonely body,
        why can't my soul escape?--or enter?