you have ULTIMATE power

I am here, nearly breathless, bruised among beams and boulders at the bottom of the cave-in.  Because it is dark--pitch dripping from the sky and trees, smeared on the mines walls like nihilist's graffiti--I imagine that it is night.  I am searching an empty sky for constellations.  No light, no crack in the invisible ceiling.  There is no light, save for my brain's remembrance of light.

There is my breathing.  For a time, I pretend that I care about the conservation of oxygen.  I slow down.  And in that near silence, I take inventory.  I am aware of my body's failings, and it is probably better to go to sleep rather than to feel any of this.  That would be letting go.  No strength, no will to struggle.  Although I am buried early, I am a little grateful for this coffin.  With patience, I will be dead.  With patience, I will be forgotten.  I try to relinquish everything to the black.  I remember when I was a child how afraid I was of the dark.  

If this is a dream (it easily could be one), then there must be a thousand possible endings--either joyous or despairing--that my mind could invent to rescue me from this hole.  I don't know what to  do with it.  Everything is uncertain.  My thoughts are muddied with memory. My prayers are corrupted by doubt.  Hope-less-ness.

I acknowledge history, the mise-en-scene is made of thought.  Frayed projections from childhood, from college, from the courtship that originally created these tensions carry objects and actors out of the past.  These dance before my mind's eye.  If I open my lids they retreat into the black, the night, the tangling density of nothingness.  I close my eyes and revive them.

The old unraveling threads are said to require resolution before....

There can be peace.  But this is one of those small things that turned out to be a big thing, in the end.   Its creepy, actually, the way events resonate across time, a two minute conversation thirty years ago stays in your head, word for word, while an entire meal might pass tonight without a single word being uttered.  For a second, I dwell on the handful of heads that might be bent in remembrance of me if I should die here.  The Christian diet for pleading is obvious, but you know that even eastern meditation is merely brooding with your eyes closed and the hint of a smile.

Further on, and my naked body is laid on black marble, the strange phenomena of premature rigor mortis managing both the taut physique I never had in life and this unapologetic erection.  If only I had survived that "accident".