birthday '12

You plunge down the road, from home to home, and all you want to do is have some sense of purpose, some small achievement to show, if only to beat the encroaching night. The sky is overcast, the horizons, starless and bleak. The ominous gray of the right and the shrinking pink of the left conspire to make sure every oncoming gaze reduces you to innumerable flights of terror. Your resolve is shaken; you veer off the path into doubts unspoken, dangers untold. But only momentarily. Mild westerly’s kick up a heady breeze, easing the stuffiness inside. With the wind comes the phantasmal dust, dancing across the spectrum of vision, concealing that which is near, accentuating that which is far away. Across the dust’s erratic screen, alien eyes project surreal images, living silhouettes of objects lifeless and bound. It gets in your eyes, the insidious dust. You rub and there is aggravation. You don’t and you are blind. Rain begins to pour; fuses with the dust. Your perceptions become a murky pool and you wade through them in fits and starts. Your mad dash is now a snail’s pace; your purpose is defeated; your achievements, flimsy. Inertia carries you forward; frailty slows you down. Passing familiarity becomes a ray of hope. You latch onto it like space-junk at the end of a comet’s tail. It takes you deep through the realms of scorched clay. Colossal mud cannon point mutedly at the sky, belching acrid black fumes, as though they just fired at god and now await reprisal. You deviate into abstruse inquiry and all familiarity is lost. The darkness you had set out to conquer overwhelms you. You are home perhaps, confined and suffocating; home, from where there is no going away. And resurrection, it feels like such a distant promise.