The Adversary

The gun lies there in the dirt, matte and maniacal and begging for an enemy, but there are only victims here, half-hidden in the murky shadows of eyelashes and silently screaming for a voice because I've become all too good at tuning them out. But I have my own quest, gun and bullets and all, and I can't be bothered with the stifled moans of the already dying because if I move an inch I'll join them swirling down into the event horizon of eternal blackness. I was knighted once by someone who didn't matter and given a quest of my very own, but what becomes of the knight when the quest proves impossible and his only purpose becomes existence itself? Does he push futilely onward for king and honor, or is it long since time to put up the armor and rejoin the bleached and bland reality of second choices and forever regrets?

Candles

There's something more than what I see.  Something beneath the surface, a place that exists somewhere between wakefulness and dreams.  A world set against the color red I see when I close my eyes and look towards a light, a world of shadows and truths... a layer somewhere between my heart and my mind, where feelings and words blend together into an inexplicable mixture that even I can't decipher when I look it over.

Why am I here?  Why are we here?  Life is the ultimate in circular reasoning... we have life so that we may help others with their life, yet they have life for the same reason... we have life to enjoy it, but that doesn't explain its purpose in the first place.  The answer's there, somewhere... written in a language nobody speaks and hidden in the intricate designs of every leaf of every tree, and translatable only in a flame, where if you look long and hard enough you can see the bridge... you just can't see how to cross it.

Cake.  That's what I call it sometimes... life is frosting, but beneath it somewhere there's a cake... a cake we never really get to enjoy, though we get a hint of a taste in those rare instances when there's such a connection between us and the world around us that we can almost hear music; the soundtrack to our life that almost singlehandedly gives it meaning, though we still don't know what.

I've abused every cliche in an effort to find it.  I've run into the empty field at night and screamed myself hoarse at the unanswering stars, I've prayed and prayed to God for an answer, I've wished on every shooting star and every eyelash, longing with a tortured self I don't even recognize to have my eyes opened to something else.

You know what I mean?

Unspeakable

I stand alone in the dawn on a field of rolling hills with flowers and bugs and cold and I wish it could have stayed like this forever instead of fifteen minutes, but soon the sun will be up and everything will be painfully clear and I'll run and run and try to improve the time but I'll only end up exhausted and worn out and waiting for another night to fall so I can see clearly the fox who skirts the edges of my life with a smirk, seeing nothing but my failures and inadequacies, my sins and ignorances, my attacks and betrayals. To him there is no me, there is only what is wrong with me, and his eyes look more and more like mine every time I see him. I wonder how long it'll be before the sun goes behind the clouds forever and the eternal dusk will set in; the world lingering on the edge of blackness, flirting with the dark and toying with the sentiments of all those who fear to walk in the night. I stand alone in the dawn on a field that isn't here, looking out at the hills that don't exist and wishing with every ounce of my being that this world will emerge from the flickering candle and replace the one I don't want, because in all truth there never was a dawn, and there never will be.