Spirit empty,
body heavy,
unhappiness weights a soul.
Bereft of any desire for change,
tortured from the inside out,
stuck in a desolate wilderness,
a pear-like shape crashes to earth.
It plunders in impatience and fear.
Touching upon this before,
timidly, fingers have traced an outline,
wearily, a mind has detected a nuance,
a fragment of something grander.
Gracefully, I have danced around the issue.
Running from it, I have hidden in the shadows
of looming institutions and places to be,
of pedestrian choked sidewalks and stale airport terminals.
I have masked it, in the everyday,
of sisterly love and the attention of others,
of 9-5 school, work, family, celebrations and gatherings,
I have pretended that the light is on,
I have been faking it all along.
What is this, this great freedom of being that with it comes chains
cold, steel links of slavery,
shiny, rose tinted illusory worlds,
and a confinement of thought?
What is this, this deep, weeping wound that bleeds
out of every crevice, nook and cranny?
I have rolled it up and tried to smoke it, I have peered into a bottle
and tried to drink it, I have kissed it wholeheartedly and made love to it on
a bed of nails, I have eaten it until my stomach felt close to bursting
I have drank its wine, pissed its stench, I have read about it, talked about it,
sat in parishes and prayed about it,
I have gotten down on my knees for it, I have even jumped out of airplanes
for it, still
it persists and it pervades
this existence
numb and unknowing,
it divides the whole,
in the depth of the gut.
It exceeds all definition, all words on paper,
all emotion, all expressed feeling. What is this?
What is this when even in the midst of the rehearsals, plays and performances,
in the midst of finals time, and the first days of classes,
in the midst of travels to foreign destinations and exotic locations
even in the midst of new friends and flirtatious romances
a nameless void festers?
What is this?
I would prefer some temporary sort of contentment in lieu of this
aching, gnawing, endless nothing. It is the why and how obesity is reached,
baggage to be pulled along in this life. It is the accumulation
of material goods, the ball and chain of civilized life.
It is the busyness of soccer practice, piano recitals and part-time jobs.
It is the cut-throat world of advertising and sales,
the eat-shit-and-die, fake-ass smiles of politicians.
It is the harbinger of new sciences, it rings in medical breakthroughs,
and it smashes through glass ceilings.
It originates in this immensity.
Pleasure found in watching babies grow, in seeing dogs bound
from sea to shore after a beloved stick, reminds but fades away,
for I always return here to this state, to this great county of lack
and servitude.
A lighthouse on a distant shore I cannot locate
and though I know I can best access that revolving beam
when I am fully present and in the moment
when my skeleton is moving through this spacetime warp
I still somehow refrain,
from dancing
I still somehow forget
to sing
to free my breath and allow it the chance
to dance with angels, to frolic with demons
to be pure energy and to be free
of the trappings
of ego.
