Nihilism for Breakfast

With each alarm, I held my breath.  I would be--in those first minutes of my morning--a little confused, my impressionable mind under water, struggling to surface.  Then, after a pause, there was always a gasp.  The cool vapors burned slowly in my lungs, a song remembered, a forgotten cigarette.  The cat, sensing movement, pushed open the door; the blue luminescence of the chamber was cut in half by a shaft of buttered light coming from the hall.

It was as if some truant essence returned to me.  On those rays, from sun to field to window to eyes, I came into my body.  I returned home.  The relationship between the physical and the intellectual, the practical and the spiritual became clear for me (for a moment).  And that intersection and the challenging balance that it implied left little room for my soul.  That billowy bit of anti-matter which I had tacked into the corners, pulled tight to the edges, pushed into the hidden architecture had now begun to inflate.   

I could feel my soul in dubious opposition as it strained and struggled with this captivity.  I stretched my arms above me into the inflection of the honeyed light.  The sun was still brightening, still chasing the shadows of the passing night.  My eyes widened, my fists opened; my fingers had become chubby pink petals extending from my blossoming hands.  And these, projected in sharp shadows against the far wall, were untenable organisms.  They unfolded into generosity.  They unfolded into rumors and lies.  They unfolded into hopeful amens, prayers unspoken...

Again, I adapted to the idea of being human, the idea of being alive.  The vestigial heart, the vestigial skin,  were nearly torn by this daily replanting.  But I was a dream amphibian, crawling out of the mire of my own subconsious, instinctually striving for the next adaptation  I was immured by such mythic divinity, I was barely human.  Give me a different cage, a pet name carved in marble, whispered in the lamentations for the dead.  

I am a creature often caught between the poetry of being and the poetry of not being.  Like ice beginning to melt, self effacing, shrinking under the pressure of an ide, I am patient.  I have always been patient.  A child, an adolescent, a man, I have waiting quietly, eyes skyward and made of mirrors waiting for the great cave-in, the next shooting star.

There I was...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

The emptiness of everything began to pour into him, the black transparency of night.  It was as if the inked ribbons of twilight, the heavy lid of this still glowing saucer, had begun to sit with less expectation that the night before, the rain and the anticipations of the next day and the ever encroaching flood.  "You are a good swimmer," the man I imagined must be the captain had said to me.  He had suffered a great loss once.  I was waiting to suffer mine.