The moon’s
gone missing in the branches
and leaves enmeshed overhead, that
allow no light
to enter this place.
At times,
there’s movement in the spaces
between your toes, while
you follow
the faintest sound of running water
at an unknown distance. And
as you try
to exert your way
through your surroundings,
there’s too much in the way of
your body, your breath, your voice,
hair, eyelids, nails, teeth, and most of it
is neither soft to touch, nor too still, as
the forest constricts and
the trees close all about you, when
you remember that you weren’t alone
when you got here… in
the melancholy of dying light
of a long-forgotten sunset; but
your bearers couldn’t help
evanescing into the quiet cover
of oncoming darkness, along with
some friends you discovered, but find
much too far away to hear you
now. And somehow,
you feel it isn’t
strange to be unafraid
of a light and palpable hold
upon your shoulder, because
of a familiarity so unconditional
as to flow from the very wellspring
of all things you are
or ever may have become.
But in time,
the abyss eclipses the intellect
and your senses begin to overturn, until
perchance,
your hand touches
the searching fingers
of a stranger, for
each to hold the other
in reckless shelter, and
persist on
making a way through
this night, the savage brush, toward
the sound of what
you imagine to be a running stream
at some unknown distance.
It hasn't
been too long
since a time I lived
out of hiding... yet
now witness all wit
slipping surely
and slowly beyond
the reach of my expression, when
I find that I can't be honest, which
stems from an abiding threat
of dire repercussion, were I
to freely speak the mind. This
world, to a great extent, is
built on bloated egocentricities
that hunger most
for further aggrandizement; and
for a life of liability
and quite limited means, it becomes
a stage
where malcontent
must! be sterilized
by constant inward rehearsals, until
the paranoid self
may deem it safe for permitted discourse.
But it isn't quick, is
never easy and rarely works out
the way one imagines, and more often
I find it too late
to come back with a
*socially acceptable* retort, as
the violence of my aborted voice
is smothered beneath an agonized reticence.