The Traveller's Litany

The Traveller addresses the silent deity:
    "From the brazen cathedral, the pilgrim comes,
    To this secret landscape; I beg you, hold,
    Look amid the twilight sands,
    Where neither day nor night can compete,
    For internal despair afflicts all,
    When eyes exult, and distance makes the lost forgotten,
    Striking near to the core of me,
    When I see your beloved temple in decay."

Mithras stirs and speaks:
    "My son and daughter have forsaken me,
    And I have placed them in the sands,
    Lifeless and cold, they survive,
    They that sorrow vast and boundless,
    And molder near the ruins that sink alone,
    And which sunk my shattered remains."

Traveller:
    "All that I have seen fails to draw the rising cause,
    That, over a child, enchants the line of understanding,
    But remains deaf to the learned sense of silence,
    I have watched and kept all that I am from my fate,
    Do I come to this place at destiny's cusp,
    To find that destiny has come too late?
    You are gifted to draw the children's line well after,
    His land lies in the west, her moon in the east.
    Summon the prodigals up from the sand, my Mithras,
    Do not beg to be forgotten."

Mithras:
    "On this desert, tell words of sand,
    You, the traveller who is the last of my faithful,
    Stand around those who sneer,
    On whose lips the land was mocked,
    The land that met the king half-fed.
    I do not beg to be forgotten,
    I will not suffer to be remembered."

Traveller:
    "Can none teach that any place may be bred like breath,
    How lies scar the truth, sent mad in their difference;
    Nor, on certain air, who listens most of it all away,
    Take the neighbors' defeat and triumph in shame?"

Mithras:
    "Look mighty, yet handle it well,
    Carve your passions in stone;
    A calm despair can only bury you,
    Like me, an antique of the sands."

Traveller:
    "Is there death now, and heavenly honor?
    With winter, we turn the fingers of afternoon.
    When the slant of light departs from us,
    Weight gives shadows being, but they are difficult, secret things."

Mithras:
    "The names, the lies, the legends, the monuments,
    Both of the king and the sculptor, trunkless, they appear,
    And in my heart, I feel but a wrinkled visage
    Of the Traveller I once was."

Traveller:
    "After all, have you ignored yearnings, my icon?
    Long ago, I learned passions in the fires of youth,
    That a beautiful burning, when extinguished, expires,
    I have found raptures in simplicity, like the dog at my feet;
    I have felt the lance in my soul when I have gone unseen."

Mithras drifts in his thoughts and does not seem to hear.
    "Is that colossal pedestal,
    From which I, beloved, once commanded,
    Stamped bare with decay?"

Traveller:
    "A seal undeniably imperial, the throne of our one,
    His meanings are harder bred than any cruelty or love,
    Is it a play of the winds where you are now known?
    Is it because of their tunes that we hear nothing?"

Mithras does not answer.

The Traveller begins the journey back to the nameless city.

What Is Owed

Dearest Le---,

When you found me again, I had made my way, haltingly, painfully, slowly, to a place of equilibrium, of balance, of peace. I had found ways to be at harmony with the world around me. I had come to find joy, fulfillment, and hope in the very moments of the day. My damage, while not "healed" by any measure, had been accepted -- grown to scar tissue, instead of the persistent, acute, and immediate wounds which had so dominated virtually all of my past.

I accepted and addressed hardships as they came, without being provoked or maddened by the vagaries of circumstance. I did not dwell in hatred, in rage, in seething obsession over the wrongs done me.

This was the state of my being when you found your way back into my life. I don't know if you understood or believed it at the time, but when I looked at you, it was only with love. That old feud of hurt feelings added no weight to my heart, and I saw only the woman who was once my dearest friend -- a friend I have missed so very much. If you wondered why I was so contrite, why I seemed to have so fully let go of old grudges and injuries... this was the path you found me on, seeing nothing to gain from insisting that I be allowed to boil in my own hatred.

I owe you endless gratitude, a debt I can never repay. I cry echoing thanks to you from the innermost lost passages of my heart's labyrinth.

I thank you for helping me to escape from that frozen hell.

I thank you for reminding me that I am not a creature of equilibrium, balance, or peace.

I thank you for reminding me that love is, itself, the source of all injury, for what we do not love cannot harm us in more than the most superficial ways.

I thank you for the pain you gifted me, which shocked me awake and allowed me to spit the half-chewed lotus leaves from my mouth. The pain which reawakened my soul to the reality that if I am enlightened, that enlightenment does not find its center in the temple of harmony, but instead the shrieking tabernacle of chaos. I am not eloi, not bodhisattva, not tzadikim, nor would I ever aspire to be. I am morlock, anantarikama, kallikantzaros. Not angel, but goblin.

The pain, reasonless and selfish, which you rained down upon my unsuspecting peace was the only panacea for the drowsy prison into which I had interred myself.

Also so, with that in mind, I hope you understand the intention when I say that I hope, sincerely, profoundly, from the deepest parts of me, that -- where ever you are, whatever you are doing -- I hope that you are in pain, just like me.

N

July 13th, 2008

And if we demons have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
False stirring of the labored air
Has never proved a body there;
Nor in the day nor in the shade
A vestige of the truth unmade,
But bloody thoughts and dreams
Oft lend life more than it seems,
And all that we have ruined and wrought
Might from an empty purse be bought.
As dreams can live, so might they die --
As life, a lie within a lie.

do I ask too much?

seek to be slighter than that which is the least of all things
only to be told it is too much

seek no more illumination than the moonless night
no more shelter than the threadbare blanket
you ask too much
too much

no more than touch

too much
too much

the difference between
the precipice and the void
is the perception of solid ground

perspective

wrong echoed footsteps in stormlight
walk by places where things happened
i get lost
two footsteps to a different world
under these trees i spoke with a priestess one spring day
walked away
wrote another childish poem about it
on those steps i sat smiling before dawn with a beautiful friend
wearing everywhere each other's fingerprints
there in the fog i once saw a beast with no name
all moments so important
so vital so
but only to me
i won't even ask

for Ne----

i tread tonight's quiet waters
and hope your sails have taken you to warmer shores
so i can be
the only one whose visits keep these lost places afloat