Whirlwind (Poetry Project #1)

Bump. Set. Spike. Repeat.

I could hear the screams and cheers loud as gunshots in the crowd,

But my mind was hazy, like smoke from a forest fire.

Black spots danced before my ocean blue eyes,

Waltzing as if at a wedding dance.

 

Until then my life had been defined

By the skills I possessed on an all-or-nothing court.

I tossed my mane of hair and summoned the gazelle-intense will to focus.

Rocketing the game ball through the gym’s atmosphere,

I served it into the net’s gaping mouth.

 

The disappointment from my team hung on me like the heavy dew on morning grass,

And I struggled not to allow the dams in my eyes to break.

My body’s rock-hard resolve, however, broke.

My feet felt stuck in five-foot-high snow;

My breathing accelerated past the normal speed limit.

 

The shrill whistle like a pot chiming for tea sounded in my ear.

I was stripped from the court faster than a tornado flattens a town.

Dejected, my head bowed as a tree bows in the wind,

And the sense of the end loomed on my athletics horizon.

My bones shivered as if a part of me had been stolen in the dead of night.

 

The weariness afterward caught me in its warm embrace,

And the skin-pricking blood tests determined a low Vitamin D level.

At least, that was the makeup I used to cover the blemish of reality.

Truthfully, the cold, spindly fingers of depression caught me in their iron grasp,

And I was powerless to stop the whirlwind spiral of soul-searing despair.