Camus' Midwinter Dream

We are all going nowhere from nowhere

 

Snow outlined the branches of the trees that shattered the sky

Fragmented clouds

January come and gone

A chill in the air; a chill in the fingertips

The tree branches like prison bars frozen over the windows

The long fingers of the wooden judiciary grasping at me in dreams

This winter everything looks like a cage

Bone cages my brain

Concrete cages my body

Ink cages my soul

I have not written in thirteen days

 

Whole conversations pass by that I can’t remember

I’ve been forgetting names since December

What day is it again?

Time splashes like water running out into the gutters of the universe

I am lost in my dispassion as time grinds away my youth

Apathy over conviction leapfrogs

into infinity with the lie always one jump ahead of the truth

Neuron cripples neuron. I grind to a halt

The telescopic jail cell of my skull peers through the vault

through the night sky of fragmented clouds I abandon that emaciated soul

Why do I feel lost? I scream from the mizzenmast of my consciousness

 

Through vastness we approach the ruination of conceit

A mote of algae flecked silt on the bottom of the sea

drifting…

The light of stars is not beyond defeat

for no matter how fast light runs it finds the darkness has already been there

and is waiting for it.

The Stelliferous age will end and all the stars fade away

The horizon beyond horizons is ever shrinking,

Even as the swirling stars are sinking

and we are one with the unconscious chaos that destroys them both

 

We are all going nowhere from nowhere

 

The world I see encompassed

With no North Star to point to

We are all lost in delusion

Our arrogance blinds us to the truth

we have no control

We have no grandeur

Reality itself is a pale simplistic reflection

Of the frothing sea of particles and disturbances

that is the universe

We are a domesticated species spreading seeds across the Earth

Our minds are territory in the conscious realm fought over by ideas

Like gods warring upon olympus

Ecologies domesticate

Ideas Dictate

Societies sublimate

 

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…..

 

I am lost in my delusion too

All the aftermurmerings of hydrogen and time

say to me that all is meaningless

Déja Vú

My greatest delusion has always been that meaning is required for happiness

Production is not required for worth

The love of others is not required for

the love of self

My tongue swallows steel

There is no grain unground by the wheels of entropy

and the wheel itself shall fall from it’s axel

Embrace your suffering

Roll your stone and your dice

You will burn with joy

and freeze with sorrow

for all sensation is an exultation

 

We are all going nowhere from nowhere

 

Do not retreat from it to delusion

Rejoice not in the longevity

but the experience of consciousness

You can handle the truth

Your whole soul to soothe

Poetry Terms Demonstrated: 

Comments

Stoneface Lavender

Cover art by Bradley Theodore.

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