escape

as it was in the beginning. the words float through my mind as i lie here on the ground looking at the almost darkness that i pretend is there in spite of the lights casting a glow into heavens i am sure were nothing more than a fairy tale for the childish adults of times long past and the foolish of today. pinpricks of light dance in arcs predictable to those with screens and fingers but in my silence and stillness there is little pattern in their not quite circles and stepped on failures of roundness. i taste the last of the summer’s lavender on the wind as were it tea poured into my open mouth but as i lick my parched lips in the undarkness there is little there but the salt of the day and the surprising warmth of fujin’s offspring forcing themselves on me. i don’t mind and let them enter me as would i never do for another. even susanoo’s sister herself in all the beauty of life and heat. yet in moments of pain i consume her offspring too. red orbs and green miniature trees in water of bubbles in steel’s contained reflections. but such hours have past as here i lie and drink their memories from today and my eyes twitch with each falling star. in the instant i watch another drop and contemplate its earthly contact that i dream exists but catching my breath know it is nothing but fantasy as close is rare and survival through my broken planet’s heat is unthinkable in its blazing hatred of those who come from elsewhere. i reflect in ways they never have the chance to do on the ocean that stretches just out of my line of vision. i hear it there crashing on the beach where i learned to sink and eventually to swim. to fall and at times even to climb in spite of weak hands and flailing footsteps on paths barely noticed in times of panic that never truly ended as i grew in body but thoughts departed from pathways and sat beneath trees whose mirror images reached for glowing orbs beyond unseen heavens while mine turned childhood radio static into a positive state of remembrance and sheltered me behind branches whose leaves changed color but never fell. i capture the sensation of seeing the star fall through the surface of an ocean but i have little idea where the image began. the rocks i once lofted with all my strength only to see them fail in their escape from the world and fall with splashes were darker than the dreams that prompted them to fly when young was my overwhelming description from the other. my embodiment of light’s absence grew and rocks ceased to willingly take hopefulness on the wing and become demonstrations of the futility of leaving. i was consumed by their departure and intrigued by their acceptance of their fate. a departure without gates either airport or dharma was neither unexpected nor benign yet i remember each one bouncing not for a moment before its final plunge beyond the waves to be lost forever yet only transformed. perhaps that’s what it was that touched me so thoroughly. the acceptance was not of death but of transformation. sudden in its beginning but interminable in its continuity. a rock always yet somehow less than one in its merging with the liquified solidity of the base of all existence here. beyond cold into the heat of pressure from within where it would be transformed with painful exactitude to rise once again if future allows it. but in me i find no acceptance of that transformation and cling to this moment as it is the only thing that i in any way wish to accept. and in the instant there is an understanding that i may never even accept this. the pain that i feel as the sparkling reality above my face shows me that even this in its greatness is simply a reflection of something that is never still nor wants to be anything but what it is. a changing mess of chaotic undestiny. a forest of planetary meshes around stars whose lives and deaths lose nothing in their temporal longevity compared to the essential nature of all birth and death within my world. i cringe in the realization of what has been lost in all the time that i have not accepted yet somehow i cannot bring myself to change this into the next breath i take. i hold the air in my lungs and beg myself never to let it out. to cease from gasping the life that is given from an atmosphere where i sought never to continue to exist. training is strong though and in my weak resistance i open my mouth and let carbon into the world as again i fail to follow through on the instantaneous decision to depart as did once those rocks from hands i now abhor. there is peace here as i lie and search nothingness for absence and find it not. black is not the color of oppression here and its hope fills me with a light that all the whiteness of the day and of language and of lies spoken in spite of knowing ears could not hope to imitate. color has lost its meaning in the heavens and beyond and afterlives’ callings no longer seek to give me pleasure in their hopes. i taste the awareness beyond wind’s lavender tea of times cold appearing in hours if here i remain yet there is no impetus to leave and reflected in my eyes there are all things. nothing is missing from me in the night of abandoned stars when the echoes of the world are here between hair and mouth in glasses not quite round but seeing. in closing my eyes i hold no more dreams of death behind fiery places above me and in this moment give myself to sleep.