alone

A poem from a conversation with a friend. Touching on those moments when you can feel totally alone or isolated whilst surrounded with everything familiar.

How strange-
to be in the land of
Friends and Familiarity yet
surrounded by the desert of Anonymity
stranded in a sea of confusion and
discontent.

Like the wax that trickles
down the candlestick and hardens,
the feeling makes you grow cold
and the fear hardens - paralysis.
As you strive in vain back up the
candlestick to the life of the
dancing flame.

Fear of being alone presides,
alerting the spirit to loneliness
but no explanation or rhyme
as to why you awoke cowering in the
corner of this darkened cell - everyone
else seemingly in sunlight.

In the place you call 'Home'
where friends and family reside
this feeling, realisation, fear arrests your spirit-
How can it be?
It overtakes nevertheless, the dislocation
compounded by your location.

Dislocation - from, the other, from
community.
Disorientation from the familiar whilst in it,
seemingly forced into some fable you don't
believe - to play a role you did not
choose.

In ending, it does not necessarily persist
not patronisingly tempting you with the
hope of relief.
It just departs, having made its presence
felt, fleeing too quickly to become an
intimate bedfellow.

What of 'departure'?
A vanishing? A forgetting such that
you remain in such a state?
A denial of its presence?
An inadvertent dispersal having 'worked through
it'?
Who knows - all or none you fear.