The Slow Decay of Eternity

What is the real life?

What is smoke and what is solid?

Where is the golden jewel that shines with nuclear majesty?

Cradled amid silver twigs with blood of molten suns

That small and sacred spark shudders with a heartbeat

A surge of breath into a muscle devoid of wonder

So that meat is galvanized by electricity.

This smoke drifts and curls

I follow it in dreams

Sitting in my chair behind my desk

(My brain awake)

I watch it dance and I see clearly.

In the night, though clouds are heavy

I see with rare sight.

I have walked in this world’s streets

Tasted a dreamless sleep

The vacant eyes of people walking

Not awake

Not dreaming

Drifting like flotsam in the sea.

Their faces are worn smooth and their eyes are blind.

They cannot see.

An old man left his village to climb a mountain.

He said he went to see the face of God.

He climbed over jagged rocks

Trudged through bitter snows

Shivered in cold winds.

But he continued through the night

Passing through clouds and up the last steep slope;

In darkness he ascended the spire.

Morning came, and he clung to the pinnacle

Ablaze with brilliant light.

Early evening, he returned to the village

He could not see, his eyes were blind, but his face shone with light.

No one ever knew…

And no one asked…

Was it the fierce sunrise, unfiltered by dust and haze

Or did he see God’s face for a single shining second

Before the frail organs of perception shorted in spiritual sparks?

Yet the old man was not unhappy.

Children, even men and women

They gathered around him, sat and listened.

 He told and retold the story of glimpsing the light of heaven.

He would lean forward, raise a finger, whispering, “The Light! The Light! I have seen it!”

In his blindness he would whisper, “I see it still! All I can see is light.”