Friday, May 20, 2011

Morning

I feel sick with an unbearable pain.

Excruciating, it calls my attention

to dark places ignored, now flooding with suffering.


Lying in the wake of my own shortcomings.

Lying in the ash from my lungs, the blood from my wrists,

in the still, dead morning of May.


I breathe in refusal, refusal to heal,

and despair breathes me out.

But what else can I do?

The years have taken many forms,

but underlying is the same substance.


A substance infinite and terrible,

at the ground of all Being.

A yawning nothingness we are never

to pay heed.


Or rather, we do not pay it,

but it steals from us. Steals every chance,

steals my every chance,

every shot in the dark

at being happy.


And after my morning vertigo,

Horror recedes back into the recesses of my mind.

And I drink my coffee, have my conversations,

with the Shadow lurking near,

waiting for the cover of night.