Please tell me I am blessed with a mind,

that I can connect this and that to form something else;

that I can breathe in the knowledge of the senses

and build my own system of beauty or destruction,

and feel that this is my “destiny.”

Please tell me that my language is sacrosanct,

that my words are blessed by the practice of ages

to the point they are etched in surety,

and what I say wraps around the cloud and the flower

and around my fellow humans as what they are,

and that this is sufficient for me.

To whom do I address this plea?

To myself? To the world?  To the gods?

Or do I send it to the cosmic judges

who see me for what I am as mindless bits of matter?

Is there is no arbiter of the question, no jury?

I am alone, and in that aloneness

I capture my singularity of existence,

be it glorious or base; be it shining or dull;

be it full and encompassing,

or so small as to be continually vanishing.

And what do I do – I use language

to announce my outrage at my own folly

of this single absurdity,

and it is language that folds me in the arms

of a magic perversion of purpose –

the purpose of creating waves of my person

that emanate into the minds of others

and then back again to me,

faint and unrecognizable.

It is surely a lonely place, this promontory

overlooking a sea of incongruity,

and how might one be content

while observing their own improbable self

continually on the edge of cognitive deception?

Words…..words….the swords and tentacles

of invented truth that bring us close,

then cast us away like shipwrecked souls

in a place of nihilistic shadows.

But what is left if one denies the food

that language brings to the mind?

Is nothing there but the meat and muscle

of the lizard brain that acts on the impulse of the moment

and curls up in the pleasure of a dominant sense,

with a sense of strength and satiety?

We have come from the oceans to be seeing creatures,

and it is light that gives us succor to find our paths,

and it has been words that captured that light,

so imperfectly as to be deceivers in the heart

of what we are.

Sad to say that words convey that words are nothing

more than pathways to death,

since death is only captured by words,

obscuris vera involvens