Two steps out my door and I fell apart. All the familiar
sights and sounds stood by watching. My only friend now is
the ground. She offers me stability, support, and someday
will provide shelter from life itself. I am not moving. But
the wind is moving about me. What could it want? No one
wants a share of weakness. I can hear the door behind me
creaking. I had not shut it. When your door is open, your
home is one with the world. And oh I want the world! I want
it to set eyes on me with envy, not compassion. A child who
fell but once and hurt his knee needs compassion. A child
who had fallen many times has hurt his pride and needs much
more than that.
People of the world, your king is at your feet, but you know
not his name nor his nature. But no. I am the sun to an
empty world. All the crowds have gone to sleep. My time has
tick-tocked out of all the clocks. I am left an offering to
the cold and dark. Men will spend lifetimes fighting these
off but surrender in a moment. I have surrendered in even
less than that.
Oh when will mother bird come and save me? I have tried
again to fly without wings. I may fail time after time, but
someday greater, wondrous wings shall grow out of my pain.
A child comes walking up the street just before the corner
he is already old and staggering. A painter stops by to
borrow my tired pale complexion. I am a poor excuse for man
but I shall make a fabulous corpse. You won't buy me with
such compliments, I tell him. He returns to the thin air
from which he came.
The evening sets with silence on the brick town. Some
creatures hope with all the sincerity that is in their
hunger that I am left here to rot. I can't say I don't
sympathize. At last someone could enjoy my body. The
over-complicated casing of my existence. But no carrion
crawler approaches. I still bare a darker curse than any
mummy. The curse of life in it's filth and it's sickening
pulse.
I've had it with the game. I'm itching for softer ways for
pity.
I get up and I walk away. Unnoticed I slip back into
whatever crack in the boiling earth that gave birth to me.
My last remains strength worm out me. I am sick of all this
warmth around my heart. It's time to fall even more apart.
My head has grown too big for my frail body to carry. I have
to crawl on my chin. With tremendous effort I lift it high
high up, take a quickly disappearing look at the sky. And
let it drop. The cracking sound makes me laugh. Skin and
Bone and blood are having a party on my face. I embrace the
little stars that join me behind my eyes.
You are dust of greater things than I. With long achieved
internal equilibrium, I raise my swollen head to the
indifferent purple sky. The ground  barely lets go of it. I
let it down again with a crunch. Crunch.
Tongues of pain surge through my body. Licking my
consciousness away I am lifted, no. Discarded.
Into a world where my only possession is silence.