Monstrous Wave (Unfinished)

Behind me rose a wave, a monstrous wall,

A childhood wide, a thousand nightmares tall.

A vision from the madness in my head,

And equal to the fearfulness and dread

You’d find in Hell. Behind me stood the wave –

Whilst I, astride some watery steed, charged forth

Towards that awful end that waits for all.

I roared my final words into the into the void,

Defiant and determined to be heard;

And as those words like giant storm clouds swirled –

                                                Above me broke the wave.

I’m not sure where it goes from here. I wasn’t particularly pleased with it: there’s plenty of energy in it, but it seems dated and melodramatic (which I suppose complements the image: sea see below).

The final appearance of the refrain, at the end of the poem, is written in my notebook: ‘Around me crashed the wave’, so perhaps there was an unconscious reason to comply with Paul Valery’s notion that ‘Poems are never finished, only abandoned...’