When You Crumble Into Eternity

Luck glimmers, then swift expires
Life blazes, then fate conspires
And each of us on our merry way

Who can tell what fate befell
Adam, was Earth his heaven or hell?
'Tis obscure till this very day

He was the very first of men
A wealthy, worthy citizen
And he committed the gravest folly

He fell prey to curiosity's curse
And lo! In manners most diverse
Exposed his kind to melancholy

He taught us shame and fear and guilt
The foundations on which faith is built
He tainted our Eden forevermore

And now he sleeps in grim repose
Bereft of the life that he chose
To surrender to fork tongued lore

But criminal he, he the fiend uncouth!
The burden that we could do without
Why associate us with his wretched name?

He the rascal, he the snob
The gullible, ignorant slob
Why should we, then, take the blame?

Cast him off, he is not our father
Not our origin, conversely, rather,
He probably never lived at all

Mankind must have invented him
To bridge over the interim
Betwixt his Eden and his fall

He is a chain in fair disguise
A noose designed for our demise
A death trap lying hidden in our tracks

Cast off at once this moral burden
Celebrate life, exalt the uncertain
Let the wings sprout from our backs

Fly amongst the heady, wafting clouds
Break through the all smothering shrouds
Of love, of life, of expectations

Seek out nature in its fury
Let it be judge and it jury
Glory in its devastations

And when, at last, it comes to be
That you crumble into eternity
And your life-wave nears its final crest

You will be glad that day, I'm sure
That you were neither gentle nor demure
But stormed through life like a tempest

Dice

In her sacred seat atop the hills
She whiles away the days
Amongst the blooming daffodils
Where all but love decays

From my lonely room, I gaze without
To view the starlit skies
Smog invades and obscures the route
Hope withers, then dies

Tinged with tinctures of delight
Her lilting voice beguiles
Her words betray keen foresight
Her lips betray a smile

Harsh, from bemoaning every trial
That Fortune throws my way
I frown, secure, in obdurate denial
And my frown is here to stay

Weaver of Fates, what madness took you
To thus unite our threads
To banish the solace and the virtue
Of solitude from our heads

Whence will come the resolution
Of dissonance with clarity
Of unity with dissolution
Of Ego with charity?

Why force two opposites together
When both stay wilfully apart
Why bind two souls with one tether
When only one contains a heart?

Were it your will to end this game
It would be over in a trice
But you persist, and you’re alone to blame
God, alas, plays dice.

Thoughtless

Think not that I have not thought
That from the cradle to the pyre
A great man's life is naught
But a well performed satire

Burn

I learn, I learn, again I learn
How Man's mind works
How the world burns
How danger lurks
How fortune turns

I see, I see, again I see
History itself repeating
Carnage wrought with glee
Moral virtues depleting
Despite divine decree

I hear, I hear, again I hear
The laments of misery
The groan of fear
The beast set free
The despairing tear
Onset of lunacy

I feel, I feel, again I feel
Crumbling earth beneath my feet
Pillars falling upon themselves
Litter flooding every street
Books unread upon the shelves
Sanity in hasty retreat

I breathe, I breathe, why do I breathe
What possible use am I to you
Am I to only rage and seethe
Until I have suffered my due
And then to decay beneath
And add to this wretched residue?

If my purpose is not for me to discern,
What care I who lives and who burns?

A Benediction

May the droplets of dew that aesthetically adorn
The orange hued sun rays that shine through the morn
Refract through the glistening moistness of dew
And shower rainbow upon rainbow on you

May the breeze that condenses the vaporous air
Add a glow to your fairness and a sheen to your hair
May the silence punctuated only by the cuckoo's call
Bring you the wisdom of Angels and virtue of Parsifal

May the clouds that your countenance discover
Protect thine fairness as they hesitant hover
From the harshness of heat and the power of fire
From the sufferings of grief and unfulfilled desires

May the leaves on the trees that eternally surround us
Rustle sweet melodies that eternally confound us
May the grass 'neath your feet caress your delicate heel
That it never lose its softness nor its visual appeal

May all of Nature, whose fury no being can tame
Bow down in subjection to the sound of your name
May all the universe combine to right all your wrongs
That your lips are never found to be bereft of songs

All this and more I do wish thee every day
Who ever exudes compassion and over goodness holds sway

Theseus' Paradox

Every day, I lose a bit,
Every day I grow anew;
Every cartilage still fits,
Every symmetrical sinew.

Where are all the parts I lost?
Are they still a part of me?
What is my production cost?
Who composed my symphony?

Is my entity complete
Without the parts that went away?
Does my unity deplete
Further with every passing day?

And what of the replenishing stock
Of cells that now make up my frame,
That mark the progress of the clock
That ticks eternal 'gainst my name?

Do they possess an equal claim
As those who left me in the lurch
To share in my immortal fame,
To pour libations in my church?

Why am I not viewed as one,
But a manifest multitude?
Why haven't I dominion
Over my self created brood?

Do I grow or just break apart?
From whom is this judgement due?
And when I cease my beating heart,
Who, mortals, will be judging you?

Just a Few Days Now

He sat in his lazy boy for hours at end, settling deeper and deeper into his imprint which had become all but permanent on the soft, yielding leather. He stared around at his living room. Chaos reigned.

The plastic bottles from the aerated drinks that he used to mix with his rum when he began the drinking binge. The crumpled mountains of plastic glasses that he had run through in the past few days, strewn in ever growing concentric circles around his lazy boy. The vast majority of them were right behind him, because what he could not see did not bother him immediately. Especially since it had been days since he could remember being sober. Also, mingling with the plastic bottles and cups were visible three days worth of cardboard pizza boxes.

His ashtray had filled up a long time ago and he had continued smoking and disposing of the ash and butts directly into his large dustbin. He hadn’t changed his clothes for the whole duration and the stench would have bothered him if it weren’t for the overpowering perfume emanating from the glass bottles that surrounded him in their preferential seats of reverence. The bottles were cube shaped, with the edges rounded off, and the top thinning out into a bottleneck. The picture of an old monk smiled up at him from each of their labels. He could not quite muster the will to smile back. Not just yet. A few more drinks, perhaps...

He glanced down at his feet, blackened by a layer of soot. He passed an uncritical eye over his shorts with cigarette holes in them, his unwashed shirt with pepperoni stains and ran his hands through his beard which was beginning to resemble the Amazon forest not just in its density, but its potential suitability to support an ecosystem within its undisturbed wildlands.

“When had it come to this?” he asked himself. He knew the answer to that. It had been this bad for only a few days now.

Just a few days ago, she had left him.

He remembered hanging out around the house as recently as a month ago. He had never been one to socialize or host parties or live the wild life. A book, a conversation, a piece of music and a bite to eat constituted his perfect day. Only that... and her.

When she left him, he flailed. Uncontrollably, unabashedly, he panicked. His mind reacted like a despairing man in the face of death would, irrationally, self destructively... dangerously. He had tried to stop the spiral by anaesthetizing it with alcohol. Nothing else occurred to him to arrest the perilous momentum his brain had gathered on its path to destruction. The alcohol had been lying around the house, but he had never needed it before. Now he drowned himself in it with the sole aim of flooding his brain with this heavenly poison and trapping it in a deluge of intoxication so that it would have no time to ponder its own emptiness.

From the moment she had left him, he had not left his room, unless it was a trip to the bathroom to relieve himself by urinating or vomiting. On many occasions, his state of inebriation had not allowed him to complete the trip all the way to the bathroom, which resulted in intermittent puddles of undigested pizza also finding their place amongst the plastic wilderness. For the rest of his conscious hours, he was drinking.

Even in the depths of drunkenness, he could see her flawlessness before him. Her beauty, her ethereal form ran through his head as if it were a melody. The gentleness of the winter sun’s heat upon chilly skin, the ecstasy of a cold brook’s ripples running over one’s feet, the beautiful descent into blissful repose that only accompanied sleep or death; all these delightful sensations could be encompassed in her person. If this were a mythology, she would be the Goddess embodying bliss.

And then, just like that, before his mind’s eye, just as in reality, she faded into nothingness. Her luminescence extinguished unceremoniously, her radiance quenched disrespectfully. Now, he could see nothing but darkness enveloping him. It suited him, this darkness. It prevented clear sight into the carnage that her departure had left in its wake.

He remembered the days when they had been constant companions. She had been a perpetual reassurance to his sense of self. She was his source of ambition and his anchor of humility. She was what he aspired to even as he held her within his grasp. With her, the world lay at his mercy.

And now, nothing. His room bore witness to his worth without her. A dishonourable wreck, loveless, faithless, purposeless. And what seared blindingly into his mind, whiting out every other possible thought in his head, was that she never looked back. She never hesitated. She never returned. She just up and left, and that was that.

He wondered how long he could continue like this. How long would his body hold out, how long would his funds last, how long would his sanity last? He considered a slow crawl back to reality. Maybe this should be his last bottle. He could take a couple of days to recover and then attempt to normalize his life once more.

But the mere notion of living brought back all too vividly the memory as well as the sensation of pain that had been crippling him for the last few days. It was this pain that had kept him from sobriety. It had been three days, but even now he trembled at the prospect of facing up to the excruciation without the aid of alcoholic numbness.

He raged at reality, at optimism, at life. There wasn’t a single peaceful patch in his life that he could recall that hadn’t been punctured by the most spirit sapping mishaps and mischances. She had been life’s one answer to his pessimism. And now, devoid of her presence, he felt akin to the lonely boatsman stranded at sea who sees nothing but a vast expanse of blue stretched out in all directions with no indication whatsoever to guide him as to which course he should pursue.

Like the boatsman, he now resolved to give up, to let his body consume itself, to let it give in. He longed for painlessness and he could see only one path to it. He sighed, resigning himself to wait for peace. A different peace from the one he felt just a few days ago.

A few days ago, before Poetry had left him.