I think it’s today

It’s a crushing and a consuming

that swallows me in its path,

rolling and roiling its path from yesterday’s nest

to the unknown adventure of tomorrow.

I am tossed.  I am torn  before the torrent,

familar though it is,

this dance with Duty,

as She always finds me,

She knows where I play in my dreams,

and She knows that name for me

that forces action and motion and thought and pushingrunningjumpingdancing.

I can smell today around me,

carrion afield buzzing and crawling

as I build a bridge for those who will follow after.

None of this is for me anymore.

“Life is hard.  You have to change.”

Naked

I clothe myself with nudity before Her ever shining eyes,

futile attempt to discard the mantle hanging leaden over my shoulders,

its rough texture worn smooth with labor and grime,

I hide myself behind transparent nothing,

fully awake and fully aware in the unveiled intensity of Her unyielding gaze.

 

Like ice beneath the flame,

the vestiges of emotion and strength and desire are shorn away,

running in rivulets to pool along my bare feet,

and to reflect once again those shining, terrible eyes

in small pools of disconnection puddling smooth in the windless afternoon.

 

It this all there is?

my beard ruffles and dances in Her hot breath,

before the unending stream of command and demand that pour from Her mind

as an uniterruptable torrent,

silent and true and strong against hope or reason or darkness.

 

I bathe in that current against my will,

for what is will before Her face?

I am neither tossed nor pushed along the streamlinee,

but rather pulled ever closer to Her embrace,

ever closer but always apart.

 

Drained.

I am empty and blown away,

an automaton marched by pulled strings

and unseen clockworks.

I would kneel or feint had I the choice.

 

I have waited her overlong,

and She comes now again,

angered that I have caused Her to turn Her head to find me.

 

The Quick Farewell

Briskly,

and through a brisk afternoon full of sunlight,

purposefully my feet carried me directionless

ever away from the monument of youth,

glowing symbol of those spaces that are lost now

to memory

or to the fog of forgetfullness.

 

I have no will,

against the torrent

even as my steps can carry me only onward and forward

down towards that end of all things,

that yawning chasm from whence nothing can return

and the little smiles and tears shall vanish forever

as all that I am vanishes forever

as brief echoes rebound a final pass

fading finally unto silence.

 

It is a bittersweet thing,

living and loving,

knowing and knowing that knowledge will cease

and that shining eyes and innocence are such fleeting vapors,

I cannot hold them,

and I weep as I see them broken away on the winds of time.

It crushes me,

the weight of this emptiness.

 

There is only alone at the end of all things,

and it is made so much more tragic in the light of these things that shall pass,

why does it all have to come with such a price?

 

I love.

It is deep and unfathomable.

I do so love,

and I will cherish these shining eyes and guard this precious knowledge

though it costs me a lifetime of lament,

and never will I let it go,

until these thoughts

and this love itself

are taken into that final void.

Tongue that Spot

alas but for an egress,

some recess

from the excess

of success.

 

I wear thin this imposter’s veil of deity.

 

This spot strokes my mind,

flaming and fanning a smoldering of brokenness

of doubt

of the Sorrow that underlies the everything and the always.

It is a waiting beast,

lurking before tomorrow,

ravenous against satiety,

heedless of victory or achievement or the unlaureled appointments of Duty.

 

The success is a mask,

avatar and persona for someone else

for another ego.

 

There is nowhere to turn,

and the unraveling threads

manifest the tapestry.

 

There lies no buffer from the pain,

and Sorrow begins to lap at my ignorance.

There,

in front of the thick,

velvety

silence,

there I struggle to relax the burning

aching knots of meat and muscle

screaming against time and age and duty.

There,

with my back towards

and my focus and spirit facing away from calm

and serenity

and nothing

I drag my hand to wipe the imagined sweat

as it is cold here

so vacant beneath the closing

crushing dome

unbreakable adamant without reason.

I smell the old smell

of burned up hair

and smoking drought of purpose –

it wafts in tendrils through this quiet space

that is no space

a place between other places.

I want nothing.

There is nothing I want.

Desire lies smoldering,

one of countless cinders among the refuse,

youth and hope and attachment and vision,

one of infinite odors mingled and tangled like the fibers of my body

indistinguishable one from the other,

emergent mass of nothing from something from nothing

and back again.

From somewhere,

some noble depth of unconscious spirit sporting the facade of teacher,

from somewhere rises a spirit of gratitude

directed nowhere and to no one,

only flowing out from an uncharted,

unknowable someplace,

gratitude for the nothing and the everything and all of the sights and sites between.

 

Thanks.

Thanks from no one to no one,

thanks existing before and after

above and outside and between

that bit of nothing that calls itself me.

 

 

Beneath it

I simply cannot.

Insurmountable weight of institution

crushes with cloying and utter disregard for truth

or development beyond the self-inflicted limitations

of twisted self-examination

through the cold queen’s mirror,

blind hanging on the granite wall

aping images of inconsequential merits

and self-aggrandizing themes

so bold in their inanity

their insanity.

Today I simply cannot.

I lie beneath this oppression,

this eighty hour torment of cracking the nut of the earth

for a morsel of bread,

only to dig another hole on the morrow,

on the morrow

on the morrow

until there are no more dawns to await,

and I lie myself in the ground

to feed the worms and dust

until I too am forgotten,

forgotten,

empty dust.

It simply is.

It is that it is,

and I am the very intent of inconsequential,

the idea and concept of trivial,

yet do I not suffer and know?

Indeed.

It was a cruel jest at best,

horrid experiment of vanity at worst

that lead me to know,

to taste what is joy,

at the cost of the deep understanding of sorrow,

the devil-defining shadow of god,

the same reality bound in different vantage only.

Today I cannot.

A pillowy soft shroud of purple-gray cloud

is raked slowly across this early autumn sky,

uncaring as it removes the hot sun from my shoulders.

With strides unmeasured,

unhurried,

I walk across the face of the world,

unhurried,

at peace.

I am.

I am now become that I am,

complete and alone and filled.

I rest my soul on the comfort of five pillars,

each a glowing strand of what I have built,

and of what has shaped this peace

and now carries these tired old feet from nowhere

to nowhere else

unhurredly.

At night I lay restless and in physical agony,

in a house that is a home that caresses the small parts of life

and smooths the folds with unmeasured grace

to drive to forgetfulness the hunger for gold and bauble,

and instills in me a swelling,

a pouring over,

a celebration of who I am and what I will leave

as my mark upon immortality

though I must surely fade as those forgotten before me.

But for now,

I am here,

and the I that is me can live a bit longer,

perhaps,

through these ten glowing eyes

and shining smiles,

echoing through eternity in protein and laughter,

I shall become even greater still.

 

Pre-joy fog

Bow me down before I sleep,

the long, tired walk of restlessness in pseudo-dream

and fog between waking and knowing.

Therein lies a mist-blanketed shore,

acrust with gems of shell

and litter strewn by eons lost

beneath Time’s own slumberous tread,

forcefully forged from bone and shield

to powder dust of crystal

and thought.

On silent beach spill sapphire waves

yielding their life upon unlit sand

and polished heart of wood

no longer adrift.

Under clouded night

with moon hid behind gauzy cloud,

gray-yellow above the black glass sea,

unfolds nothing

but weighty time

and build of pressure,

dead steel of sword upon my head

shorn and cold and alone in thought

beneath ever deepening nightshadow of cliffs

tall and stern and proud –

unyielding.

 

Unfold my eyes before the dawn,

cold grey expanse.

The day is pain of sinew and structure,

of back and foot and head and heart.

Perhaps the joy, indeed, lies under varied sky,

and I err to search for it here.

Therapy

Though I rise slowly,

the Earth drops below me at an alarming rate,

the palette paling from verdant azures to the quickening void of space.

Even as the vista shrugs off the color and sound of life,

my view is narrowed,

pulsing and throbbing in silence at the edge of my sight,

washing away to a single, uninterrupted circle of focus,

a portal into a deeper nothing than that surrounding me.

I am not truly here,

no.  I am no longer truly anywhere,

and it is a broken husk with sightless vision that stares emptily

at a horizon that my consciousness cannot perceive –

I am become a ghost,

tormented apparition that is itself imperceptible

even as I lose the concept of perception.

The breath of the wind touches something that used to be a part of something

that I was a part of,

but am no longer.

The rushing caresses the intimates of ears

that no longer drive thoughts of hearing or of sound or of meaning,

the clip of my boot on the ground is a sound lost,

empty shaking of air with no information,

no echo in my person.

Like the breeze race past thought upon thought,

dreams of understanding,

aspirations of immortality and of grandeur,

and all that is is contained in the wake of their passing,

but I am no longer drawn to stretch out the reach of my mind to grasp them.

Instead I know of their passing,

I understand the loss of their whispers

as my apathy and impotence finalize their emphemerality.

Like a single drumbeat,

cached in the roar of thought and unheard sound and sightless vision

stirs a still, small voice that hums a single phrase;

Sickness.

Imprisoned

An old creak as the doors of the morning rattle from the sweet cover of unconscious dream.

The painful light of being bears down on me,

urging and pressing and warring.

In waking there is no repose,

Duty latches onto my first thought –

a schizophrenic voice,

maleficent and sharp.

There is no soft glow of morning here,

no quiet solitude before the dawn to prepare.

Here no sailors press the shoes of luck before the day begins,

for the night has been a brief pause only,

and yesterday’s burdens beat the dust of responsibility from their coattails

and into my sputtering,

coughing lungs.

Now the cold light drips down on me,

artificial and frigid,

it stings my eyes even as it reminds me that nature lies afar

just outside my reach,

just outside my sight.

I rot in this cage of the mind,

watching as each precious moment of being is traded for a morsel

and mortgaged for another sack of chores,

always waiting

always bearing down and pressing crushingdehumanizingdamningkilling.

There is no escape.

I have no metaphor,

no poetic analogy.

I am trapped.

This is Hell.