Gathering Murk

The psalms I trusted to still my spirit now dissipate into empty echoes that gnaw at the edges of silence.  Strength abandons me, and I am left to stagger through the wreckage of my own mistakes and longings.  Each footstep grinds the bones of the neglected deeper into the earth, a sacrament to futility and ruin.  Where once wholeness made its home, only a slow, patient unraveling remains, like a prayer recited backward into the void. I am no more than a censor, a hollow vessel straining after what will not stay.  I have this heavy task upon me: to labor in a world of murk, to strive where all striving withers.  I stand amid the collapse, breathe through the mirage, hope through the shadow, cling through the doubt.  With a weak fractured heart, I wrestle onward, desperate to find something even in the ruins.