Ephemeral Obscurity

a thousand steps into the void

a thousand steps into the void

The hour was late, the moon was down,
I had not heard the clock strike twelve.
Night had descended, fast and furious,
and all the world lay quiet in its dark.

I looked to the skies and looked for the stars,
but all the shadows of doom had blotted them out.
I looked to the tower of ivory gold
but it, too, no longer shone as it once would.

The road is long and fraught with peril,
the stairs are steep and the steps too high.
But this here is the path you must tread—
this here is the path you must take.

                                                               Go now,
while the city sleeps. For when it wakes then
I cannot speak for the safety of your heart,
your mind, your soul—or theirs.

How fragile is the psyche of this world!
The Sentinels stand guard, but it’s hardly enough.
One rip in the gossamer veil of this dream
and we could all come tumbling, tumbling down.

The oceans were calm when I sailed across,
and swans danced with me over its mirroring waves.
But no longer does a silence lie over the sea
and the perpetual winds have stopped—ended.

The flames danced in their firelight,
and I shrouded myself in ashes and rain—
a cloak of the darkness that did more for me
than the sun or stars ever even tried to.

Strange were the rivers that I came across, and
stranger still the island of the nymph. But still
the four winds would not let me go on my way home,
so I drifted the skies and danced on Midnight.

But the ice woke me—and the snow falling in flurries.
They asked me why and I could not answer,
and that was when I realized I had gone off-course.
But where was the road? Where is it now?

I lost the road—lost it long ago, and
all the charts and maps in this world
can’t help me now. By the hand of no-one’s but
my own I shot an arrow in its eye—and lost the way.

Woe is he that strays from his path,
and woe am I to have forgotten what I am.
Concrete realities and concise superficialities—naught
but glass on the ground, but shards of a lost life.

So you can throw away your simple complications
and nonsensical theorems about the journey of life,
because I’ve walked it once and I’ve walked it twice
and I still don’t know where my destination lies.

Has this all been an illusion, then? A hallucination
of catastrophic proportions? My own phantasmagoria—
my life while I followed another so blindly?
Where are my eyes now? Where are my stars?

O transient world!—do not mock me so!
I’ve wronged and I’ve lost the heart of the world,
and the in-between I tread on collapsed beneath
my very feet.

                       But won’t you give it back to me,
now; won’t you help me find it again?
Take me under—beneath your waters, and
let me sleep til the end of all days, all nights.

I haven’t learned? I haven’t learned?
I’ve drowned and burned and died and gasped
for breath even as I was buried alive—
through pains unimaginable—and you say I have not learned?

But the sun is here and I cannot see the light,
so perhaps you’re right—you are right,
I have not learned. And I’m lost now, so lost.
Let me be a simple keeper, then. Let me keep the gate.

And if the gate is mine to keep,
will you send my heart back to the land of silver?
Let the silence keep it safe—let the silence keep it free from
all the shadows of the world—all its debacles—strangers.

The hour is late, the moon is down,
I have not heard the clock strike twelve.
Night has descended, fast and furious,
and all the world lies quiet in its dark.

I look to the skies and look for the stars,
but all the shadows of my doom have blotted them out.
Mayhap I should have stayed and watched;
but now they are gone, and I am left behind.