Sunset for Someone Else

As the sun just kisses the horizon, bursting into a flood of crimson, I cannot help but remember my lips on yours and everything that stemmed from it. An eruption of the highest emotions I had ever felt took charge of my life for years and left me scarred, bruised, battered, loved, admired and deeply affected.

But these reminiscent thoughts only last so long, as your hand brushes against mine, passing in front of the image in my mind’s eye. I had forgotten that we were sitting next to each other on that grassy hill, staring over empty green land at the expanse of the world beyond, the sun still dipping lower and lower. Time doesn’t stop or slow down, you see, no matter how profound the moments.

We make the most of our time, you and me, sitting there, waiting. For all of time’s consistency, if ever there was a moment when time froze, it was then. Silence thickening. Weight shifting. Eyes glancing.

Then, it happens. The silence and tension culminate in a cacophony of noiselessness that is simply unbearable. We slowly, painstakingly turn towards each other. It is hard to look, both knowing what we want but for some reason feeling guilty about it. Fate would keep us apart and its force holds us back, holds our faces from the other, pushing eyes to the ground. But what links us means infinitely more than that.

In a moment of triumph over the impossibilities of destiny, our eyes break from the oppression of indefinable forces and meet. Time may continuously melt away but it doesn’t matter; this is the only thing that matters. In an instant of understanding that no words can ever define nor actions ever give true meaning to, yet minds can always identify, we gravitate towards each other.

Separation is just as unbearable as fate’s suppression of who we are. Our faces blot out the sun as we draw closer and closer. All that is in my view are your eyes, those eyes. My mind wanders again, sprinting on into infinity and never reaching an end, as I glance into those eyes that are just as indefinite as an instance of pure comprehension. In that space of time that could sit on the tip of a pin, I feel everything, the weight of love and hate, sorrow and joy, peace and foreboding. Everything you made me feel, will ever make me feel, enters my body and courses through my veins like a drug.

Alas, reality rips me back as precious contact is made, skin upon skin. It is not a holy palmer’s kiss but a real one, one that captures everything my soul felt on the edge of a pin. You cannot call it lust but you may call it love. Though, words lose all meaning or fall short at moments when profundity rules the second. At that instant though, words are irrelevant, everything is irrelevant. Some may call it apathy but I call it enlightenment.

Our lips part and it is as if all exteriors are ripped away from me so that I sit bare and naked before you. There is no instant of realization like Adam and Eve where my nudity or yours is anything of lust, or embarrassment. It is an understanding in its purest form. We bring to this meeting everything that has happened in our lives, a culmination of our collective existence. What has happened makes us who we are. We lay it bare.

When everything is in the open, when paradoxes are clear, when contradictions mean everything, whether the sun rises or sets becomes utterly irrelevant. Everything is beautiful and nothing matters but you. The universe destructs around us. Forests burn, nations crumble, oceans evaporate, and suns die. It is an ending of all things, but you and me. The insanity that the collapse of space and time brings is almost as unbearable as fate itself. If we were to exist in this moment, continuously, for forever, whatever that means, I would lose myself to it.

As our eyes meet again and Fate’s hands pull us away, I see everything I felt, where my soul could tread and where it refuses to end up. That existence is so tempting. It could define a man and break him. The force of Love is the most powerful substance that inhabits our universe and perhaps beyond it. It courses through me and through you. Every time we meet, it reacts, it explodes, it destroys the universe around us and leaves us in each other’s arms, bare and naked, with nothing but souls, with every moment of our lives revealed.

You have given me the most beautiful thing, freedom from the confines of this universe and for that I will forever owe you everything I am and ever will be. The indebtedness is not terrible, but it could also drive a man insane.

Fate has pulled us apart. We sit in tension again. Eyes glues to the ground. Silence grips everything. Silence is all that we have left. And as we both glance in unison at the horizon, we realize as one that the sun is gone and only the moon and the stars stare back at us.

An Apology to the Helpless

Someone before asked

"Why the caged bird sings"

And the answer

Couldn't matter less.

What is of concern

Is the world outside,

What is not in the cage

Rather than what is

The people, they watch

They jeer

They poke and prod,

Pushing the Bird to the

Edges of its wits

For no one will stop

To question

The solitude of imprisonment.

The jungles still grow

The birds still nest

Time trundles on

Still, the isolation persists.

And torment too

Poor Bird,

You deserve better.

The people though,

They can act no different

For they have their own cage.

It traps their actions,

Shackling them,

Forcing a pattern of movement.

It plans their words

And anything outside

The confines of these prison rules

Means certain retribution,

So I'll apologize Bird,

For what happens to you

It isn't your fault;

It's the world's.

Darkness in the World

Darkness fills the air with an ominous tension, black dagger blades poking out to taste a drop of blood from your flesh.

And what is left, what is there in the folds of ebony enveloping your body? Perhaps existence, perhaps the key to eternity, it is impossible to tell with a blind eye or at least one gouged out with the blades of darkness and reality.

The emergence of a light somewhere in the void draws your attention, illuminating the chamber in which you stood for all time. The ceiling still ebbs away into the darkness, too tall to exist. The walls, if they were ever there in the first place, begin to disappear, or they seem to, edging out of conventional sight if sight still exists. The walls are just as eternal as the ceiling. It is only a ninety degree shift that sets one apart from the other.

But they might as well not subsist at all. After all, your attention is on that small pinprick of luminosity that lights the world around you.

It beckons.

“Will you enter my embrace?” It asks.

Dare you answer the seductive voice? What if it is all a ploy, just a plot to torment, destroy, break, or manipulate you? Logic departs.

“Y-yes,” you stammer, beginning to sprint across the world for fear of losing the light.

And then it begins. The one thing that logic could have gained for you the only reason it was ever worth listening to rationale. The dot of light in the distance flickers, like a diaphragm hiccupping. It grows in intensity for an instant, bright white light flooding everywhere, burning your stabbed eyes in some impossible way, then fades away quickly to darkness, then alights again to the same luminosity as before.

“You’re too slow.”

“You’re too slow.”

“You’re too slow.”

It only repeats.

Somewhere deep inside of you, your heart quickens with the pace of your steps. It grows faster and faster until the voice in the distance is drowned out and all that exists is the bass beat of your heart beating in your eardrums.

Then unexpectedly, there is a moment, one singular instant quicker than the beat of a hummingbird’s wings when the light extinguishes. Simultaneously, your heart hiccups in tune with the light. You hope that perhaps it is only flickering again but hope is the beginning of disappointment.

Once the light goes out, you stumble on a few steps quite taken aback with what has happened. Your hope is extinguished and the darkness stabs in again. The walls that, moments before, seemed so eternal are now so close. They collapse in on you, crush you, stab you. Eyes are useless and ears, they are too. There is nothing to see or hear, nothing to taste or smell.

But oh can you feel! It feels like the darkness is jagged, scraping your skin, tearing your flesh apart and feasting on the blood that drips out. All that exists is you and your agony and the dark knives around you.

But for some reason, you don’t feel the agony of your life slipping away. The only thing you can feel is that you are alone.

A Kind of Longing for a Soul

Candlelight flickers

Reflecting off windows

As rain patters off the surface

Beyond the panes of glass

You can almost touch

The cool water slowly

Dripping off the surface

Like tears down a cheek

The light is dim and

It makes me wonder

What lies beyond the shadows

At the break of day

Are we going to see

A beautiful orange sunrise

Over the crisp clean hills

Or an obscure light

Only dimly visible in the distance.

I would like to say things

Things that have hope but

In the end it's all the same

One sunrise can't change

A soul, but who am I to tell the future

That is not for me to decide

After all,

God is the one who paints the sky.

A Cave, False Security, and Spilled Ink- 4/17/2010

Spinning the pen

The thoughts come slow

Flowing through the

Eye of a needle

We are

We were

We will be

alone

Lost and disdainful

Uncomfortability of

Disjointed moments

Convoluted meanings

Convoluted instants

At the edge of a cave

Sharp, jagged edges

Teeth of the maw

Devour time

Blackness creeps

Pouring like ink

Staining without entrance

Into the mouth of Sadism

Into the mouth of lies

Into the mouth of

Disjointed existence

No recollection of

Last or

First

Just...

It's there

The cave is there

Jaws closing

Heart racing

Eyes drooping

Seduction of false peace

Fight it

Open your...

Sleep now

Comfort now

Then forget.

The sight fails either

Eyes shut or

Ink blurring

Visages

Chest raises

Doesn't fall

It's not true

It's not...

No point.

Maybe I will just sit

Maybe you will just

Maybe we will

Maybe it

Maybe it's ink

Upon blank pages

Nothing more

Lies

From caves

Fight it

Open your...

Sleep now

Comfort now

Then forget.