|Asc(end)|

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Wisdom is the warm acceptance of disillusionment.

Life is a hierarchy of such wisdoms, Each larger and more terrifying
Than the last.
If there is a last.
Oh, there is.
I just wish I could wish it
Into non-being.

An infinitely spiralling bungalow,
Clouds swirling, kissing its top floor
Veiling what awaits the death-craving soul,
That climbs onward on it, leaving a trail of vomit
On every staircase column.

Regretting secrets
Secreting regret.

An unswerving trail
Of regurgitated food,
And inedible pain,
That follows you, smothers you,
Like unrelenting rain,
Or troubled childhood.

A continuous map of higher and higher insight,
Culminating in the infinitely large, the infinitely terrible.
The infinitely terminating.
The end of ascent.

The bungalow
Is a sham.
So is life.

A stack of creaking floors.
Episodes laid out in an endless montage
Each aimed at partial enlightenment.

Like a loving mother
Doling out larger and larger fragment of love,
For harder and harder attempt.

Of course, attempt is what terrifies.
What breaks.
What softens
More often than it breaks.

For the only visible course,
In this trembling, creaking
Relentless force of existence,
To advance to the next lesson of wisdom,
Is to let your current floor
give.

Yea, let it plummet away to floor one,
Only to find itself lapped up
By your boy, your blood, your son,
Your own byproduct of lust
That threatens to stray wayward-
And bear his body upward.

What then, lies tremoring at the top, awaiting me?
Who can give our wrecks of souls
A map to all the floors?
Who can divulge
If I shall find much
At the apex of effort and energy?
Help, anyone?

A cryptic Almighty?
A laughing philosopher?
A nihilist clown that whimpers
'Life hasn't an aim whatsoever,'
Conspiringly over my shoulder?
Anyone?

There is no query
In whether to survive.
Jumping out before the end
Only inters all my attempts
Into the soil.
While my pain is then borne
By another moron
That a similar query forms.

The query lies in
'For what?'
Unto what end?
Why make me break my bones
In the eternal ascent?
Why make me suffer,
Why make me repent?

If God up there has a cosmic scale
Why make us go through worldly pain?
If life is a game, and we're pawns plastic,
Why do we crave glory with morals elastic?
If nothing is beyond, not bliss, nor damnation,
Why push us through this bitter process of elimination?
If life is an abyss, why do we make friends?
Why does life goad us forward
To the indefinite end?

Unravel this query, o Common Sense.
And I shall ascend
In happiness.

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