wake up!
My body is salted relic, an impenetrable tomb
that still houses the seeds of life.
If you were to find me, I would hear your cries of joy at my discovery,
and cry myself, unable to wake from my stupor to explain my mysteries.
The moon glares, rightfully; the Southern Sea, still in the South,
foam and waves and all, and I, floating somewhere between
Tokyo and Texas.
I haven't lived a full life.
My veins are wires that won't conduct.
My mind cannot bend the current, or radio my deployments.
A fugitive in the tunnel of time, unable to distill in myself
anything besides burnt and broken emotion.
Flames would help light the way, to find my the source of my suffering
at least, but there is no fire, only calcified charisma.
Only the sealed knowledge of a universal picnic basket.
If I was to speak, it would be in foreign tongue,
an ancient numbering system, consisting only
of references to light and darkness.
If I was to move, it would be a sorry display,
a vaudeville puppet show on the wrong side of town.
And if I was to feel, I would draw the cold breath of a lone wolf,
a slave to survival, a wanderer in unexplored territory.
I cannot wake up.
I scratch and itch at the aroma of fever, my shadow
cast by candlelight in a sweating temple under the stars.
I lick for water, but feel cotton.
Lying helpless in the desert of lost faith,
I've become a stopping place for snakes and swindlers.
I am lost in nowhere, walking towards anywhere.
The simple beat of the world, the rhythm of nature,
and the erratic adventure of humanity, I cannot hear.
I drift in a sound-proof box,
tossed back and forth by cold winds that never let up.
If I were to fall in love with any of this,
the sky itself would crumble, and I would be resurrected
as a pebble forever tumbling down a mountain.
A pebble of no consequence.
Against the passage of time,
I stagger and stumble on every moment,
as if wading through a brew of heavy magma,
a drowsy tonic which makes the ground itself wobble.
“Take your medicine,” says The Sun, but I mostly refuse.
When I am confronted, my spine slithers out of my body,
and I collapse into a pile like a sack of spare parts.
I cannot find help from my friends,
who have all left on their own voyages long ago.
I cannot seek compassion from my love,
whom I may never meet.
I can only stare at the endless pages of fine print,
unable to read a word.
At night I sometimes think it is day,
and in the rolling meadows of my sadly impossible dreams,
I envision a metropolis of angels, and I am welcome everywhere.
But that is a dream; everything is a dream.
When I touch the sky of the future with a steady hand, that is a dream.
When I peel the bark off the tree of scriptures, that is a dream.
When I stand in the doorway of the real, that is a dream.
When I become ice as water does,
and melt glistening in April's warmth, that is a dream.
When I run playfully through the summer woods
with the girl I've only just met, that is a dream.
And when I dream about the dream I had coming true...
Anything real, anything that lives, whether it be rock or flesh,
is presented to me as an object to be studied,
a node in my field of vision.
Every hour is mapped mentally, packaged perpetually,
stored away in an unlabeled drawer
until the day I'm finally able to speak.
But my tomb is endless, and the echoes are silent.
This world is a carcass that I am eating,
which in turn eats at my mind.
It smells of mummification and formaldehyde.
I could have been a scientist.
I could have been a sage.
These are the words I translated today,
ancient carvings discovered in another time,
but remaining mysterious until now.
I was born once, clear, unknowing, ready to trust.
~
2001 - 2002