Enlightenment

"Is it a cave or is it a tomb?"
She threw the question in the air, a small and round vernacular grenade, where it dissolved and hanged on heavily. It was poisonous smoke, invading each and every pore with certainty and defiance.

He felt it hitting him in the face, a slap from his reflection (but one that was consciously taken, this time).

Both the sanctuary and the prison, it was consecrated ground - the rarely used television, the bed strategically positioned by the window, the most constant and ancient piece of furniture. It might as well have been made of stone.
The history of him and of them breathed with vibrant life, though softly concealed. Memories survived buried under a slight layer of grey sand, underneath the carpet. The symbols were both origins and materializations of devotion, as brightly colored infant rabbits gently placed on the tallest shelf, staring straight at your humble believing eyes. He was, after all, a believer at heart. 

There were tons of people accomodated in the bedroom, looking at each other for years but remaining strangers. It was very crowded, but not uncomfortable. The people were dead, so no physical issue was ever pondered in that matter. Dead are also the saints, figures of worship and objects of wonder: unreachable to the touch of a living hand, but ever so present in the mind's eye. Their absence just as present. Their words of wisdom and guidance echoed lost somewhere in between the earth, for the earth held too many voices at once, all of them equally nourished by the perfect ammount of humidity and warmth, chosen with the personal touch of the mother herself. Still it was confusing, especially when the sudden flood of silence preyed on him. The saints would not shine any light on those nights of skeptical distortion and muffled doubt. The reflection menaced, it was the discrete imp within working its way toward the end.

Warm and moist, welcoming, like the uterus, it was a church of the child and the jail of the grown tree, precocious but aborted. He blossomed in ecstasy only when faith filled his lungs and the clothes were no longer heavy and wet from the secretions - sweat, lachrymal waste, water. Because it was still earth, there was no space for those oceanic habits, the contradictions were harmful to him.

But how deep in the ground, exactly? He wondered how permanent the nature of it all was, the imprisonment and the praying, as he started to see instead of blindly swallowing. It was the single grain that separated the hermit from the corpse. The budding sapling from the poplar. So he exhaled the poison from the question, without a resolve, but with a clearly formed path to follow.

It is not a cave or a tomb; it is for him to discover.

Rivers Met

Restless head full of insomniac tenacity, 

I think of what kept your towers high and stone-cold on those many nights,

when only heavier drugs could lend you the peace needed to dive

into the lighter sheets of deep sleep.

Or did you ever reach such depths?

Times were such that they could only remedy the enormous waves in your head,

but never reach any clear cure to your ailings.

Numbed seas that could never be silenced.

Which currents drew you into waters so troubled and violent?

These doubts run through my own mysterious currents, at least tonight.

Maybe we fight similar shrouding tides of past burdens

that won't settle with being left ashore.

Or, even more likely, I'm reading my own miserable patterns into

what you will never have the voice to explain, your own tales of hardship.

It is only certain that our streams cross, more than once, 

sharing this incredibly uncomfortable and crippling ocean of a mind

that never shuts up.

Spontaneous Exercise

Dipping this napkin into cold water,

and reading into the urgent drawings that start to infect

the paper.

Then pressing the much softer former napkin

in between two fingers, feeling the product of such spite

disappear,

pressed onto skin, filling in the blanks.

Finally, removing the now slightly frayed and torn paper, which has also dried quite a bit,

whatever sensations or drawings experienced left recorded in you, but forgotten by the canvas.

Motive

I swallowed you by mistake, 

as a rather cheap excuse

to dive into the comfort of my own allowing.

Metropolis

The most sickening city there ever was

happened on the inside,

and remained overpopulated with the scum of wishes aborted midterm,

bastard offspring driving wildly through the avenues of his skewed reasons.

Every disturbing citizen rushing towards downtown, where the festival took place

as the sun went down and incinerated the urban maze.

"Chaos bleeding", you would say, but rather subterranean than exposed,

subtle confusion that bled into every wound of asphalt that pulsated,

living organism without a living purpose.

The grand mystery, lacklustre in nature,

inspired not even the mildest glow of curiosity:

how such complex civic structure, in such a terrible shape of inherent disarray,

did not crumble into itself, left to the dust and vermin.

Maybe some fault is to be held against the foreigners that treaded the poisoned land,

with healthy hearts and solid bones to offer, and willing to breathe out clean air.

Still, no effort has proven enough to bring light and stability,

leaving the streetlights forlorn

and the insides hurting ever closer to the core,

before returning to form.

A society is yet to be born.

Geography

If north depends on where you are,

what is ever certain or solid?

Facsimile maps of self are fraying,

flawed rivers not flowing,

landscape broken but

wielding a compass,

still.

You kick feeble, familiar rocks off the way, into a cliff,

for no other reason than to learn.

Is south where you are, or were you

even willing to be?

Salt Water

A walking body of information

roaming freely throughout the red earth.

Its stare bleak, and in it imprinted pictures of death,

which seemed to be always too close to the chest.

Late lunches and heavy silences falling straight to the ground

from the body, the way concrete would fall,

but not breakable like a stone. 

Accumulated residue from weeks and months of 

waste.

The only pulsating light is still there, little life

that blows by like wind and shakes to the wind too,

on red sands.

If someone could capture the scene in a single take,

it would seem to be eternally in motion.

And beautifully so.