Failure and maybe change

Death to me fails as a fear. It has for all my life been the image staring back at me on the blank surface. On the white wall or wooden floor, in the shelves of books, in the apple core. It stalks me who it believes to be its prey. A stalker I believe to be my predator. My friend. More perceptive than any company ever kept. Sensing my flaws and weaknesses and holding them in karmic balance. Released like shrapnel to shred away my flesh. My self. I do not fear death. No stoic abdication of my cosmic insignificance. I do not fear death because I have not lived. Existing in death more than I ever have in life. Maybe in laughter or in smiles, or the boy with pretty eyes. Moments and flashes of life as death happens. Death we embark towards when we start crawling and slapping. Death is not within my fears. The smell of it, its thickness in the air. It embraces me with love and violence. Reminding me that in a life not really lived death is never hiding. 

 

Troubled, it informs me, of no desire to risk or no want to create. The pain and their rage and the hatred and their suffering, flustered like messengers who in their madness start muttering. Musings of war and declarations of independence. My king demands more and my people serve sentences. I’m sick of my life I’m fucking off to Thailand.

 

Concepts that come to me when facing my pitch reflection. Things seen in the darkness, in the absence of distraction. In the absence of a screen. In the absence of anesthesia. There, in the dry stale image of my room where the clothes aren’t washed and the floor needs a vacuum it confronts me and I do not fear it. It is present in that room with eager eyes. It presents to me my death in the stars in the sky, clarified by distance, by absence.

 

It must be I know it, and yet I hope and I pray it is not my life you take away but my breath. As you do in music and in dance and as you did today. When I witnessed you who live, in motion, in play. Moving synchronized despite your different walks, listening to lives pass by as you whispered as you talked. Not musings of madness but expressions of existence, declarations of hope. The people you wish to be, the narratives that you host. If only for a moment, only for a second, you feel finally alive or seem somewhat seen. For once your life is not organised by blinding light from a tiny screen. Absence which doesn’t make you crumble or make you jump. Movement not from a couch, likeness not like a lump.

 

There is no further day of rest from it all. The wonders of wisdom and the pain that this holds. No patience or penance could capture it. Every person to meet, each wonder, each world. There is no great answer to the ultimate questions. The way things are feel at best to me wrong. Why we turn inwards and yet away from ourselves. Why in the pursuit of the greatest depths we have become so shallowed. Preoccupied by wants, our vanity becomes holy and hallowed. Outstripping our souls and our self. I do not need to see you smile on my telephone when it's late at night. I do not want to talk to you when I first wake up and cannot breathe. My mind which doesn’t produce but consumes. This week's information and this week's news. Does not in fact care of your opinions or of your views. I am an angry existor. Destroyer judge and observer of waste. Wasted time and wasted lives. Wasted minds and wasted cries. For attention. To be seen. To alert all who are watching that we were once beings. Golden and great and unhappy and hate-filled. 

 

I continue to write despite having my pain killed. Numbing my feelings and muzzling my moving mouth. My greatest isolation is my greatest disgrace. I do not need to be healed by connection or by love. Let me observe the world fly past me vertically, at pace, as I bleed into this post and resent the above.

 

When I am gone. When the day’s dirt has long since furnished the pews and decorated the steeples. Of the sacred ground of the place of rest. Where my tongue has been taken and time rots my flesh. Where in nature I return and to nature I am equal. My message shouts on. Peace for all people.