write
I scoop the earth-blackened waters of its banks, only to see it slip through my fingers.
In the distance of my fantasy worlds,
Castles crumble.
Palaces burn.
and things that aren’t pretentious about
their brutality
break the spine of humanity
over their knees.
The crack of shattered, severed bone sounds like an
exclamation mark on the period of life.
No escape.
See? The gift abandons you, as a
faithless priest
his calling.
The candles in the temple are extinguished,
And canticles and prayers rise in supplication,
Only to get trapped in the webs and rooks of
defiled, unholy rubble, and desecrating doubt.
The hand trembles with pain,
wrinkles with age.
The fight is all-encompassing now,
and strength is leeching, leaking, leaving…
The Sea of Reality has the remnants of
wasted time, missed chances, lost loves
in your wake,
even as mines of potential and buoys of pleasure
come into view.
The sun perpetually sets on the horizon.
Fog will coat the water’s surface,
and the stars change position and darken
as you navigate.
The rudder of the pen skips,
The oar of the pencil splinters and cracks
even as it shrinks.
The laptop lighthouse can no longer illuminate
the safe harbor of your hopes.
Mortality and eternity mix and war,
the storm clouds full of nightmares realized,
the cirrus clouds of curried wisps of daydreams
fading to mist in the mind’s ever-changing weather.
A dark and silent bay awaits,
with no guiding stars,
no turning of the hourglass,
the broken compass, and
no sailing with the tide.
So then, captain, it comes to this:
Do you run aground, leaping safely to shore?
Do you founder and break on the coral and stone,
clinging to what remains?
Do you let go of the wheel of your life,
drifting into nothingness?
Or do you smooth out one last piece of parchment
like a billowing sail,
and once more
take up the stout and stubby oar
for the last voyage?
