The Sculptor

Each day things become a little less clear,
a little less defined.
What was once a vivid portrait
of staggeringly refined intricacy,
has become a vestige,
a truth I once had the keenness to see.

Melodramatic, as it has ever been,
to slowly lose what stands before you,
knowing with certainty,
its resolution to leave you
is as unyielding as it is
heartbreaking.

Please don't leave me.
I've fought for so long,
searched every crevice,
every gyrus,
for that purpose,
for that promise.

With a penetrating introspection,
I thought I had found it.
Found clarity,
a grounded idea of what was lost.
I thought the work was done,
that I had finally discovered
the whithering husk...

of who I used to be.

How can I possibly hope to fill it now?
When its shell crumbles
like chalk between my fingers.
How does one turn dust
to definition?

[And now cue the comeback]


Can't it be discerned what's really happening here?
That time after time what we're not supposed to hear,
plagues us with words of a nature calloused
thick like tempered steel,
skin made rough by years of use,
able to play these strings with reckless abuse
of time, of harmony,
of discord and a unified idea,
of perceived emotions and hapless
misunderstood feelings,
trenchant if only because of their zeal,
unabashedly forthright,
can't it be seen? Can't it be SEEN?
It's right there in front of us all,
whether our eyes are open or not,
give it its due and realize
that everybody sees it differently.
My eyes find what was lost,
make clay out of dust,
make man out of clay,
make me out of the
monotone gray of the unfinished mold,
just as I had pictured it.
Just as I was...

And just as I am today.

Virginia Roads

When at a loss for words, describing that which defies description, emptily staring at this blinking cursor, how could any degree of self-revelation avoid the inextricable folly of surrendering too much or too little? Let's think about that, and then scrutinize it a little more - allow each word to pique its assigned synapse and see where the reaction leads us: an exponential irradiance, thousands upon millions of subsequent flashes of insight, tracing a willow as it weeps a neural firestorm in a veritable castigation of thinking too deeply. Why follow these paths of thought when they all lead us to the same vague conclusion? Why give each word its own multifarious cause, a meaning so abstruse that even the pixels that compose it have within them an esoteric ambition? To be interpreted and expected to have some apolitical Thermidorian tendency, as a pendulum swings from axis to axis, from now to then, and back again to what has yet to happen, giving hope to what can't be seen save by those who perchance saw something of a questionable intention; is to have been made the object of your own imposition; to have been given something from which you were never rightfully in contention; to have been deprived, by supposition, of that which finds itself most desirable when you are the first one who brings it to attention. It has shared its secrets before. They are common ground for those of us who heard: stories of life, love, and loss; but to have given them away so freely only to be chastised for not recognizing their superficiality, what else can be done? Stand evicted because the neighbors moved too close? Tread the isolated valley only to find outcroppings of homes 'til then unnoticed? Speed down the road, over cliffs and bends, past long forgotten ruins, hoping to find where time begins? And once you're there, you see more of the same, that running gets you nowhere; a distance measured by how long your foot was gassing the engine, and the stark realization that the end began because someone had already found it, what then?

What then?