Ambushed by need, invidious hours return, removing all I maintain to be meaningful.
The once cherished indulgence in sadness comes to lack the empathy to allow loss.
Ready to stop, you inevitably bridge one thrashing strand with a moment purged
of motion. I am the dark clouds pushing in over the passion I prove myself to possess.
2.
For thirst, the habits of age fool a while, but the time comes for knowing futility.
The melancholy of torment eventually has the only thread to finish all you awaken.
If I disguise the echo I corrupt, together, white with black are each with harmony,
complete in eyes that distinguish pleasure, though believe acquiescence to be devotion.
3.
I wait while this ocean of abundance is given to woe, only to want without understanding.
Nothing redeems emotion immersed in the sharpness of words. The immediate pain
has to have a taste if revelation is sanity that tongues seduce in endless darkness and light.
Yet, with each hand, the past is where life gathers and I move on to where you dream.
4.
Lacking nothing, the hours are like deceits: lifeless from laxity; already inert in time.
Offered the choice, the godless only come to covet barren bearing to escape from sin.
I’m them, seeking to conceal the silence that is precarious enough, whether or not
the heart shelters each complete notion of what experience and faith inspire in knowing now.
5.
For the optimism they evoke, traditions ignore prior vision and stretch the possible to plenty.
Beyond being the raw response your wisdom distorts, age becomes another struggle to stifle:
though not in prattle with vacuous pathos; just left to curdle, as when ritual is colourless chore.
If all but reason convinces the past I move on, the sunlight preserves each future remembered.
6.
Hoary promises preface this outline of limbo, this inventory of intervals amid the chaos of
constant doubt, cursed to crave comprehension of the logic of decline, to make the present clear.
You, in due time, wrap reticence in allusion. I, like you, avoid greeting the morning grey,
as if any excuse for going, however slight, will prevent intent from being the sacrifice I make.
7.
Yet, the rest of this delusion recurs and is there in the way your choosing will become affliction.
To ask meaning, however vapid, achieves little in shadowing, in shattering the whole you deny.
You betray decay in starting upon life utterly blank, tainting any motive, as though burying
the tincture of conviction. Still, bloodless from circumstances, I find I’ve come to where you hope.
The Doppelgänger’s Defence by John Mingay
In your straining to give up, you come to want to be the Laughing Buddha; your own laughter you hid rather than have it shown to be less than a drop of life in time. You shake the sun only to find it rattles with something loose within - a lack of intactness that runs a charge of dread down your spine towards the hell so long avoided. But, underneath, it is only a game we are shown in all we have seen of this world of ours, of this path between always and never where the living go on living all over again. It is a square peg buried behind the answer to questions blurred by the flow of our being, all asking in the same angst-ridden voice, "Which words are masks to come?" Everything will flow, scrawled on a city wall: somewhere, a prophet roams the streets ahead of us, leaving clues for us to follow. But, these words are our masks, our smiling faces painted over the wrinkles of a thousand worries, our eyes speaking of having let go while our brows, beneath the greasepaint, remain furrowed by compassion. These words say everything necessary to say to see gone the clouds on a sunny day, the confusion of energy wasted on raging against immovable rock, on the fiery fury reluctant to fade. Though what of the moon to the west -half-fullas hopeful? Fading. And the seagulls at one-thirty a.m.? Screeching.Then the smallest of pieces of you goes missing and every second takes on the life of a dog; times seven, times a million, no-one’s really counting, no-one’s really there; just ghosts. Though, really, neither of us ever could say we were living if not with the mother of all creation close at hand, ready to take us back. And where we are now, as we walk these dead-man’s streets, is not to be excepted, not to be forgotten, yet, so often, so difficult to clearly see. It is our opposite, negative frame of mind that burns with waiting for the past to be no longer, as if somebody would choose to stop the world to give us time to be, rather than hang on to these lives feeling for new directions over and over again.While, even now, out beyond the bricks, deep along endless valleys, I have seen the skies scowl with intimidation and heard the wind calm to be an empty sound; haunting: I have felt the depth of the sod beneath my feet, squelching with the summer’s rain, and have held the children of this womb-like space so as to share in their purity, assimilate their simplicity; if only temporarily. And the gulls get later as the nights go by, screeching the obvious, but overlooked, I am worth nothing again… I am torturedby the unforseen challenge, whether to brains or bones, not knowing, doubting my own ability to stand my ground,to defend my corner.I am lost, I am scared,I am in hiding;trembling. Though, ultimately, I know I will, as you already can, come to find the faith to crosseach bridge as, and only when, it appears along this wandering path :free from the compulsion to foresee its span and strength from afar;
at ease with each moment, whatever the next may bring. But, for now, on the outskirts of where being is set to begin -with the years spiralling in an imposed timelessness repression alone can comfort -with the wisdom of knowing each day, each hour, each minute, as part of a lusciously delicate revelation - with the clarity contradiction assumes and the needlessness of ever wondering beyond the present that surrounds you - now, as this moment passes, laughing,departing, you are armed with all this, with all you could need for the journey, while I, finally, recognise you as just another me.