The War Inside

I cannot even recall how many battles
I fought, but I know there were many.

I have spent hours, days, sometimes weeks
thoroughly planning ahead, gathering data
obsessively, checking and rechecking facts
until my head was spinning, and
my strategy was meticulously laid out.

I cringe at the waste of energy
as most battles never even took place,
yet in my mind, I already had felt
the pain of injuries I was expecting,
and had treated others cruelly,
some of them very dear to me.

And in the end, the most painful thing is
that I can never be sure
if the negative energy of my thoughts
reached my unsuspecting opponents.

 

© november child

Artist: Owen via Photobucket

 

Warriors

Beneath hardened leather
we are wrapped in
the weathered skin of those
aged by hardship before their time,
the refrains of our war songs
are sung to the beat of hearts
as unbending as tempered steel.

Nothing escapes trained eyes in
an effective oversight of
our adversaries’ every move.
Strong hands have long achieved mastery
of  cleverly customized weapons
and those shields of metal are  complemented
by the transparent armour
of relentless courage and will.

We have become improved models
of our former fragile selves,
unmoved by the soft plop
caused by our blood dropping into
the sanguine torrents flooding the battlefields.
Leaving behind human weakness
by ravelling out discursive patterns
we ascend towards invincibility in quantum leaps.

© november child

in response to:
Plop

Mindlovermisery’s Menagerie Wordle Special Addition Contranym “September 5th, 2016”

weather/refrain/temper/left/discursive/sanguine/transparent/custom/oversight/model/ravel/quantum

Here, I used the contronym meanings of the same words and surprised myself a bit with the fierce result.

artwork: wallpapersafari.com