060316A
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We are sacks of water,
salted skins,
red seas that burst,
parting our waters,
as if anything ever leads
to any promised land.
The fascination that comes
from looking at wounds,
reminding us so poignantly
as to moments of penetration,
until we turn away
in harrowed revulsion.
Furrowed ground
that takes no seed,
and everything breaking down
into tiny fragments of grit
tumbling around together,
wearing all the edges away.
Sometimes it seems that we are
nothing more than isolated screams
from deep within a dungeon,
tortured by the inability to know
any more of any story
that chances to pierce our solitude.
It all seems less significant
than the pincers of ancient crabs,
scuttling about,
for billions of years,
across the endless sands,
rarely leaving lasting traces.
We wanted something
that we never got,
having already drowned
in the turbulence of a sea
that remains locked inside
as it tries to burst open the eyes.
Everything seems long ago,
even if it was only yesterday.
The debris of all that wreckage
strewn about during the night,
providing its own explanations,
but none of it really goes together.
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060316B
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Some of us poor wretches
can only envy,
the mediocre
and the unambitious,
who seem to be so contented
in the sum total of their lot.
We tally our endless mistakes,
wondering if they are by design,
while trying to read into them
some larger, secret, intent
as if it is all deliberately devised
to contrast with the simple lives of saints.
Wondering where the key was lost
that would have freed the mythic soul
from its prison in the body politic,
as if all that rending and tearing apart
releases up from the struggle,
to everything that is out of reach.
We love our illusions,
because it is so much easier
than anything that is each other.
Learning that being alone
is really about being free
and no longer forced into response.
Free of what we once believed
that we desired,
after all the untimely liberations
from so very much else that we needed.
Finding that all hopes are prisons
if someone chances to fall in.
The tragic realization
that one does not get out that way,
knowing all that one ever really wanted
was to find a better means of escape.
The story of the prisoner
in gratitude for wine and bread.
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060316C
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There might be one head of truth,
among all of those heads of lies,
but an experienced gambler knows better
than to try to choose
when it all looks so much the same,
no matter how you turn it.
The trouble only real starts
when you try to save one that seems true,
only to find that it takes you
to another crowd of deceptions.
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060316D
------------
There are always those who tell you
that you can never be
anything that you are,
and much less of anything
that you could ever really choose.
You kept killing yourself,
with each new guess,
as to what to give up,
and what should be kept,
but you never could get it right.
Whatever plans you made
always put an end to you,
taking you down
to where you never wanted to go,
and you can never get the dirt off.
There are thousands of things
that you would rather be doing,
than what you end up having to do,
as you drag your own corpse
nearer to its grave.
Sometimes you feel so tired of it
that you want to leave yourself there,
face down in that mud.
Hardly anyone would really miss you,
and chances are that you might never be found.
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060316E
-----------
Starting to slip away,
out from under all of that ruin.
Trying to get away
from all of that pretense.
Wishing I could hide in a dream,
and not have to come out again.
Too weary of the same old
turn it about, roundabout game.
Still have not started
that new life,
where one gets to do
some of what one really wanted.
That program was pre-empted,
due to falling ratings or censorship.
Another in the endless collection
of cliffhanger cancellations.
The world of competing interests,
that relentlessly beats and flails away
at its increasingly broken victims,
weakening the resistance.
Seems it has all gone wrong,
the way a thin thread of hope
becomes hopelessly tangled
leading to severing the line.
Still looking for what I never found,
and trying to make do, doing without.
Some of it never seems to change,
but one can always make new mistakes.
Wish I could trade away the old
for the new in other ways,
and feeling exceptionally obsolete:
the way a wardrobe ages.
I no longer think that we will connect,
and I really do not know where to go,
feeling increasingly uncomfortable
as to any of my remaining habits.
Everywhere seems to be a ghost town,
with plenty of ghosts.
They make me feel much lonelier,
and so I feel the urge to stay away.
The lonelier I get the more alone I want to be.
A getaway from more of what is contrary,
and having learned too much from regret
as to how alien it can all end up.
Sometimes I wonder what would have been,
but I was never really lucky,
no matter whether it was at good or evil,
because it all ended up much the same.
They did not let me really be,
anyone whom I would have wanted to be,
and that left no real options
other than playing bit pawn player parts.
There are those who say it is all by arrangement,
but none of the arrangements are those
that I would have chosen to make.
So I always tried to find others, and failed.
Do not ask me what I believe anymore,
because I probably don't.
It all passed that point some time ago
when I last fell into the error of believing.
There is only me, and there is no you,
though I had always thought there would be you,
whom I had never known and never met before,
but that too broke down another belief.
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