Black

 black

listen on youtube or here

 

Retreading dispensed words roamed behind thick notions from you  

accumulates into dark clouds hitting me like dark guilty rain... 

=

Thirsted grounds embrace it 

Waiting for my return to quench exhaustion

Then I blame the echoes that are scraping me,

hanging me, suspended by my secrets,

Like your smooth innuendos that end the age of innocence

So complicated yet so clear

=

taste the skin on my tongue

I hate to feel that I'm so behind  

sorting personalized shadows you left deep behind in me 

With my weakness stretched thin 

to judge which of you has hurt me

=

Nothing but the naked trees of winter suffering from insomnia like me

The blanket of the morning light overextended its welcome 

The tick-tock of the clock, out of sync in the blank, just like me

=

Here I am, dicing your name into letters  

dissecting your photograph into pixels  

wondering why I'm so attracted to you

wasting my life

While all you've got is time

I'm in the black

Everything is black

Everything is blank

just like me

I'm in the black

===

lyrics & vocals: azdi404

music credit: mistake by apbeat12

=== 

“Black” reads as a distillation of emotional exhaustion — the moment when grief stops burning and becomes cold, when language itself starts to break apart. After the volatile energy of Deranged Moments, this poem returns to quiet desolation, but its stillness is dense and psychological. “Black” is not just the absence of light; it is the saturation of feeling, the point where pain exceeds color, form, or meaning.

---

I. Tone and Context: The Aftermath of Emotional Weather

The opening lines frame “Black” as the aftermath of a storm — a storm made of words, memories, and guilt:

“Retreading dispensed words roamed behind thick notions from you
Accumulates into dark clouds hitting me like dark guilty rain”

The diction — “retreading,” “dispensed,” “thick notions,” “accumulates” — feels deliberately cumbersome, evoking the heaviness of thought that refuses to dissipate. This is psychological weather: each unspoken word condenses into “dark clouds,” a metaphor for linguistic guilt and emotional residue. The “dark guilty rain” implies that even attempts at communication have become toxic — the act of speech now erodes rather than cleanses.

---

II. Earth, Sky, and Body: The Cycles of Exhaustion

“Thirsted grounds embrace it / Waiting for my return to quench exhaustion”

The earth motif grounds the poem’s internal storm. The “thirsted grounds” — parched and desperate — symbolize the speaker’s emotional self, which paradoxically welcomes even the painful “rain.” The line “to quench exhaustion” is striking: it suggests that fatigue itself has become a thirst. What is sought now is not renewal but temporary reprieve.

This relationship between environment and psyche — clouds, ground, rain — recalls T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: a landscape of emotional drought that mirrors spiritual desolation.

---

III. The Weight of Secrets and the End of Innocence

“Then I blame the echoes that are scraping me
Hanging me, suspended by my secrets
Like your smooth innuendos that end the age of innocence”

Here, guilt takes on physical form. “Echoes” — words, memories, or regrets — become instruments of punishment, “scraping” and “hanging” the speaker. The “secrets” are both burden and tether: they suspend him, preventing movement.
The “smooth innuendos” — a phrase of dual sensuality and accusation — suggest that intimacy has become corruption; the beloved’s subtle words “end the age of innocence.” That biblical phrasing gives the poem a moral undertone — the fall from purity to experience.

---

IV. Fragmentation of Self and Language

“Here I am, dicing your name into letters
Dissecting your photograph into pixels”

This is one of the poem’s most vivid modern images. The act of dismantling identity — taking a name apart into mere letters, a photograph into pixels — captures the digital-age breakdown of memory and attachment. The speaker’s analytical impulse mirrors his inability to let go; he keeps cutting the beloved into smaller units in a futile search for meaning. This mirrors the structure of the poem itself: fragmented, elliptical, full of enjambments and half-finished thoughts.

The line evokes Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, where the photograph becomes both proof and wound — a frozen relic that causes pain precisely because it outlasts the living moment.

---

V. The Motif of Temporal Dislocation

“The tick-tock of the clock, out of sync in the blank, just like me”

Time itself is corrupted. The clock — symbol of order — is “out of sync,” mirroring the speaker’s internal desynchronization. The rhyme between “blank” and “black” suggests that temporal failure and emotional void are inseparable. The “morning light” that “overextended its welcome” reinforces this: even renewal (light, morning) has turned oppressive. Hope overstays its purpose; illumination becomes fatigue.

---

VI. The Descent into Blackness

“I'm in the black
Everything is black
Everything is blank
Just like me
I'm in the black”

This refrain is devastating in its simplicity. The poem, which began in dense metaphor, ends in linguistic reduction — meaning collapses into repetition. The shift from complex syntax to monosyllables (“black,” “blank,” “me”) embodies the emotional entropy of depression or detachment.

“Black” also plays on its multiple meanings:

• Color and Absence: The visual void.

• Emotional State: Mourning, numbness.

• Economic Metaphor: “In the black” — financially stable, but emotionally bankrupt — ironic juxtaposition.

• Spiritual Symbol: The mystical darkness of unknowing, akin to St. John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul.

Thus, “black” becomes not merely despair but a total field of being — the point at which identity and perception dissolve into one indistinguishable void.

---

VII. Literary Devices and Sound Design

Device	Example	Function
Extended Metaphor	Rain and clouds as emotional residue	Connects inner turmoil to environmental decay.
Personification	“Thirsted grounds embrace it”	Externalizes the speaker’s psychological thirst.
Alliteration	“Dispensed words roamed behind thick notions”	Creates a heavy, rhythmic drag that mirrors fatigue.
Repetition / Refrain	“I'm in the black”	Suggests obsession, emotional imprisonment, and finality.
Synesthetic Imagery	“Taste the skin on my tongue”	Blends senses to express confusion and bodily presence in absence.

---

VIII. Themes

Theme	Interpretation
Emotional Aftermath	The desolation following connection’s end.
Fragmented Selfhood	Identity disassembled into linguistic and digital units.
Time and Dissociation	Temporal disorder as reflection of psychological collapse.
Darkness as Truth	Blackness becomes the only authentic condition.
Language and Silence	The limits of words to capture grief; the beauty of their failure.

---

IX. Comparative Position in the Sequence

If we trace your larger poetic arc:

1. Creation — Godhood and artistic genesis.

2. Validate — The desire for recognition through love.

3. Straining / Rag Doll Boy — Submission, empathy, identity erosion.

4. Kamikaze — Rebellion and self-sacrifice.

5. Friend-zoned / Dying Sequence — Resignation and decline.

6. Deranged Moments — Return to chaos and fleeting connection.

7. Black — The final state: emptiness.

“Black” is thus the heat death of this emotional universe — the moment where all passion, revolt, and speech collapse into a uniform darkness. Yet it’s not nihilism; it’s acceptance. The repetition of “I’m in the black” is not just despairing — it’s declarative. The speaker recognizes his condition, names it, and by naming it, achieves a measure of clarity.

---

X. Conclusion: The Poetics of Dissolution

“Black” is a poem of stillness after the storm, where the self becomes its own echo.
The world no longer offers revelation or redemption — only reflection.
And yet, there is a strange purity in this darkness: no pretense, no illusion, no divine ambition. Just the speaker, suspended in blankness, observing the residue of love like ash in the air.

It closes the emotional and aesthetic cycle not with closure, but with absorption — all light, memory, and meaning drawn into a single monochrome truth.

“Everything is black.
Everything is blank.
Just like me.”

The poet has arrived at the void — and paradoxically, in that void, at peace.