The Puzzle

We are born with a piece of the puzzle
Spending our lives
Trying to fashion sense
From those fragments,
Those moments
That seem so random
Holes in the whole,
Incompleteness,
Marred,
Flawed,
Lacking.
We spend our lives
Trying to find that central piece
That unifies and defines us
Without realizing
It is the entirety
Not some singularity
That reveals the answer,
The picture,
That shows us who we are.
And though we may feel
That we are constructing some prison
From the disparate parts,
Sealing ourselves within a tomb,
A cold monument to something
Once warmed by rage,
We are actually completing
God's unfinished work
Giving voice
To a mere whisper
And crafting a masterpiece
From vague shadow.

Ashes

They were my dreams, my special tales
Of an adventure that was to be,
An epic quest titled Life
Authored by Fate
Bound by Destiny
And granted unto me
A spiritual blessing,
My sole ethereal gift
Signed by the hand of my Creator.
As a child my fingers traced
Those passages numerous times
By the flickering fire,
My mind bending the glimmering flames
And within those ripples
I became the hero
Completing the quest
Fulfilling dreamt prophecy
I made those dreams…
Reality
Fleeting reality.
But that fire did fade
And my vision dimmed
Before the shadows shrouded my eyes
And my hands slid from the page.
An ember of that dying fire
Drifted from the smoldering bough
Like an acorn from the tree,
A glowing kernel of destruction.
It settled upon my tale,
Took root and grew
Blossoming into a pyre
Blackening those once pure pages
Consuming, scattering possibilities
Up that tear inducing pillar that supports the graying sky,
Leaving my Life a charred mess
That I cannot embrace
Or else feel it crumble
Between my fingers,
Barren soil
Once bountiful in fantasy.
All I can do
Is mourn what might have been
As ashes fall like snow
In this my final season
Clouding the horizon
And signaling the end
Of a tale that never was.

The Sycophant

The Sycophant

Why do I speak to thee
When you are deaf to my words,
Nodding dumbly without reason,
My free thoughts lost in that black cavity
Neither saved nor preserved but lost to darkness
As you echo my speech
Revealing the hollowness beneath your empty shell?
Your embraces constrict me
Your refusal to challenge, your ready surrender
Leaving no obstacle to overcome, nothing to bar my path
That I do not cease and question
Do not stop and wonder
But only fall forward
In my intellectual charges
And become like a stumbling child
Never truly able to learn to walk
And become all too happy to drag myself along my belly
Through the dirt like a lowly serpent
Poisoned by your servitude
That I become venomous to those who fail to do likewise.
Your devoted mediocrity swallows me
Like the pale Moon does the Sun
Eclipsing day for night.
You are no golden angel, no muse, no goddess
But a mirror that reflects my luminance
Blinding me with my own reflection
That I might not see the true world
But only that which you reinforce,
A gilded cage of my own make,
Causing me to close my eyes
Pierced and fearing my own Reason
That I flee from it, smother it, cause myself to dull
And regress, devolve, revert
Into that primordial savage
Lost in the shadows
To thrash and scream
Because of you,
You undermining sycophant.

Creation

Creation

Man is the corruptor of the Ideal.
Dreaming,
Creating like a god
In the purity of his mind.
Enlightenment does rise
From the darkened mists of the abyss,
An ascending thought
Out of the deep subconscious,
That void of innocence.
That abstract is so perfect.
No shape to judge,
So free and fluid.
But man cannot see
Any piece of Eternity
Thus inducing man's frailest desires.
He is driven to fashion
Some crude model,
A pale representation,
A limited creation
By which to judge,
To know,
To give Life,
The greatest curse.
Now enslaved and static,
The Ideal has gone still.
It is the child of the father,
The abortion of the ethereal.

"The Oath of Man" and "Insomnia"

The Oath of Man
Creator of All
Condemner of me,
Dubbed Almighty;
You have no power over me.
You rendered me unfinished
Unto the world
Scarred with flaws
Blind to Truth
Numb and Broken
Modeled upon the Master,
A waning son.
You are a selfish being
That breathed Life into me
If only to smother it
With your laws, your needs,
The weight of your Almighty presence.
You placed this void within my heart
That you alone would fill
To enslave me, tie me to you
And should I remove you
Feel an emptiness
Into which I could only succumb.
How I sought you out
You who abandoned me at birth
To return to you, understand you…
Understand me.
And though evidence of you surrounds me
There is no sign of you.
You whisper across the ages upon pages, through madmen,
But never answer my cries.
You eclipse your light, my looming shade
Damning me to darkness.
I yearn to be but you reject me.
How far-sighted are you?
Vision faded, all the cosmos a fuzzy mess
Able to perceive the whole of Existence
But unable to see me.
You demand faith without truth,
Action without thought,
Price without product,
But what you offer is hollow.
You are more fantasy than philosophy
A legend rather than a history.
You have driven me from you
With your contemptuous perfection,
Your high-minded views
Beyond my mortal reach
Refusing to lift me up
But determined to bury me beneath the dirt
I am destined to return to.
So I remove your stake in me,
Accept this hole into which to fall
Sacrificing innocence upon the altar of knowledge.
I have lit my torch with the Promethean fire.
Through Reason I transcend you
Rejecting my emotion, those seeds
Whose pitiful yield you've always reaped.
Barren shall my heart be.
I reject thee, reject thee
Reject thee
For though you crafted man
Man made me.
I shall find purpose
Beyond that of your sycophant.
I shall understand thee,
Surpass thee,
Use your Creation against thee
That I may bring your Kingdom low
And you may taste
The fruits of your own making.
Suffer as I
My God, my bane,
He who made me,
His destroyer.

***

Insomnia
I cannot sleep
Trembling beneath the strain
As consciousness grabs hold,
Refusing release,
My mind throttling me
With image upon image
So fast as to blur my vision into a miasma.
Stars and clouds and streaks of light
Voices and sounds, all building to a high shriek
As the abstract grows,
Increases,
Builds,
Intensifies,
Screaming so loudly as to deafen me
Nearly cracking my skull.
The friction between soul and flesh
Causes me to go feverish,
The thoughts so rapid
Like the pulse of someone pushing towards exhaustion.
How I wish for that blessed collapse.

Everyday is the same
So damnably unchangeable.
Familiar faces forever confront me
In a world once fluid but long frozen static
Where the winds have stilled
And I find myself adrift
Lost on quiet waters
With the same sight in every direction
Of no escape, no new lands, no possibilities.
All I can do is tread or sink.
It is a world I wish to let go
But find myself chained to
In a life sentence of triviality
Where I risk becoming a part, lose myself,
When I simply wish to be ripped free.
Each day hammers the same
Fucking moments, manners, and predictability
Into my bruised head
That it may render me docile and accepting
Of such comfortable obedience to order
And the breaking of my free spirit.
It all cycles in a loop
That threatens to strangle me.
I yearn to smash and destroy
If only to alter
The banal repetition
That I may know
Change is possible.
Such is the glorious end
To this cursed existence.

***

I give you power
That I might weaken you.
Enrich you materially
That I may impoverish you spiritually.
I grant your every wish
That I may smother your soul beneath their weight.
And for all I give freely
There is a hidden price.
Who am I?
I am he that knows your dreams
And wishes to twist them.
To darken and harden your luminous core
That I may make you clay.
Dehumanize you, possess you,
Make you mine.
I am the Great Manipulator
And you are my price.

Inspiration

The discovery of beauty
Can be a torturous thing
How it haunts, possesses,
And causes my heart to seize.
I thought I once lived
Until I died
And found resurrection in such
An alien world
Where dreams became real
And fears fell like walls
To bare that once distant horizon
Where Heaven and Earth do join
And I may ascend
To Paradise.