Out, out brief candles

by Ondine Evans

We all died young by our own hands,

Some deliberate, some careless, some incoherent.

We burnt with passion, despair, loneliness, urgency,

And sputtered out before our life's wax ran out, our wicks still long, untrimmed and smoking.

We didn't ask you to love us 

(well, some of us wanted love more than life in fact, but maybe not from you).

We were just being who we were meant to be,

Or who you dreamed us to be,

Or who we were forced to be by circumstance, time or blood.

We danced, wrote, raved, sang, drew out our souls across the canvas of the world's gaze.

Often you could not see what we were until we had gone,

Then you claimed that you knew all along of our collective genius,

Sapping our bloodless corpses for another drop.

Our graves are unquiet, with the feet of mourners scattering flowers and empty tributes many years after our demise.

Would you want us so much if we had grown quieter, older, less beautiful?

A night of turmoil, a week of pain, a year of confusion,

Ended for us with death.

A soothing hand or kind word at that time may just have turned us from ourselves, 

Or perhaps not.

Depends on whether you believe in fate.

We did.

And now we are yours to adulate.

written in response to exercise eleven