“Stone Bound,” a Poem by a Friend

Here is another poem by my friend, poet Jason Morton (whose writing can be found here), He wrote the poem last year (here’s another one of his poems that I looked at recently). Again, I’m printing the poem in italics to distinguish his writing from mine:

I greet the dawn with empty eyes
Staring through a broken disguise

In my heart of hearts I know
My happiness is somewhere over the rainbow

Treasured madness a vision of life undone
Where pills are a miracle and the frozen faces storm

And empty means of visibility
Are just filling me with unreality

All I ever wanted is right here with you
What can I do but wait for a moment to find someone true

And the sky folds into itself
You are you but still someone else

And the whatevers cease
Breaking Into being
And everything is the same
When love is just a game
A hole in my sky
A whole in my heart
Where reality is breaking
And you break my heart

I let you go again
Though we weren’t together
If I play pretend
We’re in for pleasant weather
Whether you love me or not
Is the name of the game
Everything is the same
When all I feel is shame

And the sky falls again

I am stone bound

Stone heart
Stone eyes
Stone gazes
Stone sky
Stone dreams
Stone wants
Stone needs
Stone haunts

Stone bound

Here is my analysis of the poem.

This is a poem about a general malaise, affected by the poet’s feelings of alienation from the Church and the heartbreak of past relationships. His sadness endures with every new day: “I greet the dawn with empty eyes”.

Hope and happiness are manifestly fake and phoney, for he stares “through a broken disguise.” In this light, we can see the real, ironic meaning behind the sentimentality of imagining his happiness being “somewhere over the rainbow”.

Happiness, instead, is a “treasured madness”. It’s “a vision of life undone” because of the cruel false hope that is never realized. Instead of trying to find an ever-elusive real happiness, one tries to escape one’s despair through the manic defences of drinking, drugs, and other fleeting physical pleasures, “where pills are a miracle”.

The image of storming “frozen faces” serves the dual purpose of reinforcing the cold sense of sadness, but also with another ironic allusion to the false sentimentality seen in children’s movies (Frozen), as seen above in the song title from The Wizard of Oz.

This false sentimentality is all just “empty means of visibility…filling [him] with unreality”.

He has only wanted to be “right here with you”; this you could be any possible source of human happiness: a former lover who has since broken his heart, an unrequited love, God, whom he once tried to believe in, but cannot, or any kind of friendship that never came to be.

The “wait for a moment to find someone true” seems like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for never-arriving Godot. When “the sky folds into itself”, this sounds like God hiding away instead of presenting Himself to help the suffering poet. God, or whoever the poet needs, may be who He (or she) is, but is “still someone else”, not the ideal the poet has hoped for, or maybe really a far worse disappointment, maybe a complete nonentity.

Total disillusion reigns: “the whatevers cease”, for the poet cannot even sigh and say “whatever” anymore; and “everything is the same…love is just a game”, be this an imagined love of God, or the frustrated hopes of loving someone who doesn’t return that love. The “hole in [his] sky” sounds like the death of God.

In the line “a whole in my heart”, the w is intended, a pun on both words, with or without the w. That’s the point: one is unhappy regardless of having all that one ‘needs’ (all material possessions, superficial satisfactions, etc.), or if there’s a real hole in one’s life. Christianity promises to make us whole through the holes in Christ’s hands and feet, but one still feels empty, for “reality is breaking/And you break my heart”.

Note the irregular use of rhyme in the poem. In our modern age, favouring free verse over traditional meter and rhyme schemes, the latter is often perceived as naïve and unsophisticated. So here, with the unevenly-metered (if they’re metered at all) lines with rhymes or near-rhymes on the ends of most of them, we see a kind of parody of such ‘naïve’ and ‘unsophisticated’ verses, just like the naïveté of such children’s movies as Frozen and The Wizard of Oz. Sweet, childlike naïveté is perverted with the uneven meters of the lines, thus symbolically showing how such innocence is destroyed with the breaking of hearts.

The poet has “let you go again”. Again, you could be God, whose faith the poet has lost, since he and God “weren’t together” (i.e., God was never by his side to begin with, as the Church had promised He would be). You could also be someone the poet was hoping to have a romantic relationship with, but it never materialized, so his letting-go of this person is just him resigning himself to the heart-breaking reality.

He could “play pretend,” and he and the object of his love would be “in for pleasant weather”, that is the pleasantness of illusory happiness, an imaginary dawn with God’s heavens unfolded. But it makes no difference if the object of his love actually loves him or not, for “everything is the same”, whether in love or in religion, because all the poet feels “is shame”, the shame of being unloved, or of being a sinner in the eyes of a God who doesn’t even exist.

Thus, “the sky falls again”: this time, it’s the heavenly God who falls from grace, instead of Adam and Eve. The sky falls because the poet’s world feels like it’s falling apart. It falls again because he has felt these pains so many times before.

His pain is so complete that he feels everything is hard as stone, and he is “stone bound”, that is, unable to free himself from his stony bounds, his hard fetters of unhappiness. Not only are his body parts as hard as stone–as if he’s looked into the eyes, the “stone gazes” of Medusa, the ugly reality of life, and become petrified with the horror of it all–but also the sky, his dreams, his wants, and his needs are all stone.

Note how the penultimate verse, with its repetition of the word “stone” has a shape almost like a statue or monolith. It could be a stone idol of a god or love object whose value has lost all meaning to the poet, or it could be himself, having been turned to stone by all the Gorgon disappointments of life.

All his hopes of making things better are turned to stone. Even the ghosts of his past, the “stone haunts”, are petrified with fear and despair.

Let’s hope he gets stone unbound soon.