Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade
-William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”


A man gazing upon the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles on the road.
-Alexander Smith, The Men of Letters

D
arkness has welded me for all that I am worth, enveloping me lightly during the days that I can only comprehend black and white, and nothing any softer than what is caustic and rude, spoken with capping expressions.

Catching my tears in a jar, and labeling them with little yellow tags has gotten relatively tiring, so here is where I have decided to bury it, and start my next excursion. I’m sure you know – the one where you ponder your mark on the world, as if it is a minute, fierce scar in the earth’s surface, and that you’re slipping through it, listening to the popping and effervescence of your skin as you collide through time, tuning out the urgently convoluted white noise that’s superfluous conversation.

Sheltering fatigue and perplexity, I still shake, and every time I open my mouth a depraved ball of light is garnered in the depths of my being, running off the fibers that fill my empty feelings, only to explode as I part my lips, folding into pain that cannot be felt, only expressed. It sinks into the floor, and the rudimentary burning of the tiles resonates in my eyes. Slightly alarming in its austerity, a wild, fallow stare enters them.

Rumination has been lost on me, and so has it too that the clouds whisper patience in their cold, tearful ways. On the days when warmth is suddenly tethered to the earth, resting its diminutive wings on my cheeks like a red angel, I’ll wait for the wind to carry me, or for someone to find me erratic, a confused philosopher, surrounded by irrevocably stained glass. They all forbid my climbing through mirrors, wishing for the clarity that the obscure windows never offered me. And what’s so wrong about grasping heaven by a fine thread, when it is the thread that also frays at the edges, singed by my amalgamated lament?

A brief, bitter bliss is what the clouds now offer me. Ropy with muscle they give me the strength to run, and I’m carving faults into the ground before I’ve even learned to avert it. And so too do they worry, so I don’t have to feel too much myself; I can turn my ruddy cheeks up to them, staring at the lightening that wrestles in the depths, angry and loquacious. For what, I don’t understand, but what I do know is that it’s the fluorescent ink that drips out of this pen, a weapon that is as definite as my codified exasperation.