I have cloistered myself, and now I am become regret. How could I have torn myself so gently away as not notice? To have stripped all art from my eyes and gone blind, yet still walk smiling through the world? Is it some unrepentant sickness born of too much restless heartache that makes a mockery of myself and waves it to my friends as a flag of contentment?
Just now I've noticed that there is a gun in my hand, and at my feet my own corpse. Good God, what have I done?
Waking up from this dreamlessness is like getting a letter in your own hand, addressed from some past you cannot remember but that still somehow leaves you standing queasy by the door. The words on the page do not accuse but gently beg for you to return, softly cajoling with inside jokes and references to beautiful nights. Is it true? Did I once love myself? In my loneliness have I forgotten the lover that once danced here beneath my own skin and wielded the air like fire with these two hands that now scrape across the keys hacking out the words of a song I can no longer hear?
I think it must be so.
For somewhere in the cave of my skull there seems to be a ringing of
some distant bell that calls me to the man I once was. And though my
feet will bleed and my bones devour themselves along the way, I will
make this journey. If I do not? Then I am dead already and should
quit this ugly pretense, lay down in a rut of mundane mediocrity and
slowly sour like a bowl of flesh and flowers forgotten long ago in an
unused room.
Death then to the
poetry of getting by. Death to the mornings of sullen aching. Death
to the nights of lying alone while the screen of this machine burns
my eyes. Death to all these things that make me nothing. Death and
fire, and from ashes rise.
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