Melancholy

Melancholy,

I touch you as I would a friend,

in bitterness, regret, and in the wind,

when thinking of love, of the coming end,

what sorrow you sew in me is a delightfully steady thing.

Melancholy,

I weep to see

so many abusing thee.

Use you like a brothel whore, 

tossed to and fro and splattered onto

the pages as if you were not an immortal goddess

stretching on and on, lingering blessedly in the ages.

Melancholy,

these folks do not read,

not enough, not clearly, at least.

They do not see your grace or beauty.

They feel you, but they do not listen as I do.

They write about you, between the tears of a child

tossing a tantrum at the throes of life, meant to be a mantra.

Melancholy,

you are misinterpreted.

Your inspiration is forfeited,

wielded like a blade in the hands of

rather dilettante swordsmen and women.

Spun around, clashing, clanking, untrained and unthinking.

Brandishing freely and without meaning, cutting up the same misgivings,

dashing all individuality from the sadness given, ignoring your ceaseless wisdom.

Melancholy,

these poets do you a disservice.

Weeping like infants at a bruised knee,

call their hearts bright, bleeding, burning,

just at the barest hint of you, not daring to look

a little longer, a little closer, at what color you've lent

and strove to give, so endlessly unremitting and forgiving,

after you've been abused countless times, for days, for fortnights.

Melancholy,

I wield you carefully.

Yours is a blade of a double-edge,

and all too often when folks dance, they chance

cutting themselves, then whine when their crimson lie

splattered on the floor in messy, thoughtless arcs, all the while

they continue spinning as if this is some wondrous folly of dreams and dreaming.

Melancholy,

forgive these untrained hands

as they rush to grasp your studded hilt

sticky with the blood of others too nearsighted

to observe beyond the initial wounds inflicted, and dare

to call themselves deep, all the while, just for feeling such things.

Melancholy,

I do not boast to be

a master swordsman.

But, at the very least,

when I wield you,

I do so carefully.