Love, Death, Industrial - Sonnet

 

The first things I wrote after her death were ugly.

Not honest-ugly. Just angry. Pages full of threats against officials, machines, heaven and anyone foolish enough to tell me that time would make things easier.

Time did nothing of the sort.

The city had already poisoned all the words people used around me.

Productivity. Compliance. Containment. Acceptable loss.

Even grief had been reduced to a procedure with forms to complete.

I needed words the city hadn’t touched yet.

So I reached backwards, beyond the factories and the governments, into words old enough to remember when love was still treated as a force of nature.

I had lived several lives before her. Worker. Witness. Coward. Rebel. Eventually, clown.

She brought all of them to an end.

She gave birth to the only voice that mattered.

Mine.

I don’t write because I believe words can raise the dead. I’m not that deluded.

That is why I still write. That is why I still return. Every verse rebuilds one fragment of her.

A drumbeat becomes a pulse. A distorted guitar holds the scream I couldn’t get out of my throat. The machines carry her name through rooms she never had the chance to enter.

The city buried her body.

It did not bury her fire.

Love was the spark.

Death was the mask.

Industrial gave the grief a voice loud enough to outlive us both.

I kneel to no heaven, and I bow to no lie.

But when the lights turn red and the machines begin to roar, I close my eyes and find my black halo bride waiting for me…one more time.

Sincery yours,

Jon Grinmaster