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I sit here observing myself, observing the steady spiral of the hopeless. The steady spiral of the leave as it falls from its branch and sinks into sweet, sublime, death in the soil below. It becomes an extension of myself. I become that leaf and feel the decay of decades eating into my bones. The worms of memory squirming beneath my skin. The flies of desolation crawling into my eyes and ears. But I am no Venus Flytrap. I have no defenses but my betraying thoughts and surroundings. I have lived so many lives all in my head. I can dream all my life of the way it should have been, the way things should have happened, the things I should have said, the people who should be dying and those who should be living. I have an agenda. An agenda that lies as my eyes partake in the wooded enclave of my prison, crowding me inward with razor edged bars and acid-covered floor, eating slowly into the soul. I want desperately, dangerously, precariously, ominously to get away,. To sail upon the golden beams of green light that slice through the trees like something intangible, yet still very tangible to the thoughts that swirl about the summer air like zephyrs. Stop breathing and I can feel the eddies of air cool and lock me back into eternal winter. I thought about the ice ages and their cold, crisp, caress. The glaciers sculpting the land like some whacked little kid with a shovel, so much like the kid I used to be. Woolly Mammoths smashing everything in their path, I yearn to be that. I seek violence in the peace of a July day. Summer is an illusion, the world lives in winter, I am ice on my perch, melting slowly but surely, until my heart freezes me up again. One can die from the cold. The water finds the cracks in rock and dribbles in, then come winter it freezes. Expanding to tear one asunder in all the right places, and I love it. I wallow in the feeling of it, the sheer misery of it, until the ice floes numb my mind and search for the summer. One can say I have power and ambiguity with nothing but my thoughts as an audience. This is false in that my thoughts stretch out beyond my mind and through my eyes like searing hot needles. I see beauty, and I do not feel it. What's with this concrete human deception, am I a paradox on wheels, or is my perception the paradox. Can I feel things I can't touch, or touch things I can't feel? I can feel my hands clasped, pondering, they are touching, I can feel them. Of course they are my hands, one of the roots of perception, does this count? Lets try pain, then again lets not. I can definitely feel that, right now, centered centrally in the pit of my stomach. The pain of longing. A pain I thought existed only in my worst nightmares and best dreams. I hit the plane down and watched it crash into fiery oblivion. I took my modus operandi and twisted it beyond recognition. All for the sake of what I'd lost. Regarding the futility of it all, everything slides into time and is lost. Buried under the ages of humanity being constantly recycled, like the decomposition of that bloody leaf. No one will remember a needle in a haystack, recorded history is a retelling of things not feelings. A recollection of the tangible for an intangible existence. I can still remember those summer days, basking in the light of my naiveté. Knowledge hurts, pain is gain. I can make out the seeds of ignorance in the field in front of me being plowed by tradition. The forest brightening to its dismal end before it bursts into flame in the hearth of my pondering. It warms me again like the sun. But I am still in the shade, my heart is still icy-hot with desire and denial. Twin furnaces consuming my family, friends, and associates. What position should I wear? I am derivative I admit it. I admit it to no one, the birds, the squirrels, that wolf gnawing his leg off in the beautiful trap of judgment His fur blood red, crimson rivulets nourish the soil. I must end this. I am a unending flood of ideas, ideas without merit. Thought without action. A Pandora's box that once opened can only be shut by death. I refer to things, not feelings, but the sun is sinking below the horizon, a flaming comet of revelation. The sky is litmus paper to my being, the stars the fabric of my dreams. Black is neutrality in the silent ambivalence of a summer evening. It's gone now, born upon a tide of midnight so baleful it made me want to bawl. I sit here still frozen in my place. No hope of defrost now. There is no reason at all to leave. I hallucinate at the sky and what could be more important than that. I am laying back now but my view is obstructed. By the trees, I can hear the stream flowing, the blood of my heart flowing over its worn stones. An owl hoots "Who, Who?" Who indeed, who ordained this cursed state? Who appointed the governor of the night? The Dark One? Who made the night a mysterious void to the human psyche? I am also rhetorical in nature, the crickets have been my path to salvation tonight as they will every night from now on. I sequester my self form the world now because it sequestered itself from me, isolating and insulating me. I will never crack again, time cannot touch this ageless marble, sculpted by the Master. A tear disturbs the flies still swarming in my eye and freezes in midair as it falls to the ground. I never thought this day would end, I never thought this night could be this close to me, reaching out with its jagged claws, embracing me. Tearing me to scarlet shreds. I can see in the dark. They're gone………..