Dark Moods

Sometimes we get dark moods. Winston Churchill called them his "black dog days." I had one such day last spring, after my mother passed away. And so I wrote.

The World Around Me Once Seemed So Familiar
Christopher Bogart

The world around me once seemed so familiar,
now, suddenly, I feel so very lost.

Each tree, each leaf, each blade of grass
that I should know, have seen
on outings past, now seems so strange.

My life, once flooded with familiar faces,
is populated now by mere traces of humanity,
shadowed dribbles of black paint,
slender pedestrians that amble aimlessly
down slick wet streets in painted Parisian scenes,
their street signs, white, indifferent to my plight.

It does not matter now which road I choose, for

it seems that I have mastered a distance
from disaster, from compassion, from hope;
and time, like a chalk-faced mime,
now owns the transparent box in
which I’m trapped,
and I can’t see the lock,
nor find the only key.