Stand

Beauty is such a fleeting thing. We grasp it in our hands for a single moment, as if trying to capture a flickering moth. But we crush it in our cold grasp and leave behind only the husk of a dead, decayed, and broken thing. All that's left passing by are clouds in the sky, on a clear summer day. What can you make of such shifting, malleable images? The reflections of everything you wanted as a child? Castles in the kingdom of the air? Love and youth are a mirage; finally, there is only old age, memories, broken dreams, bitter tears, and the fantasy of what could have been.

Somewhere there is a supernal moment, as you stand in your single geographical location, encircled by an invisible shield of mind, forged around you like links in a chain, the "world spins on to random insect doom," and when you stop, you realize the energy of the others all around you, expelled in a programmed burst like trains departing and coming into the station on a timetable, were meaningless wastes of the valuable seconds of life, as time counts down to bare zero, and the dream shifts once again. Beauty is such a fleeting thing. We grasp it in our hands for a single moment, as if trying to capture a flickering moth. But we crush it in our cold grasp, and leave behind only the husk of a dead, decayed, and broken thing. All that's left passing by are clouds in the sky, on a clear summer day. What can you make of such shifting, malleable images? The reflections of everything you wanted as a child? Castles in the kingdom of the air? Love and youth are a mirage; finally, there is only old age, memories, broken dreams, bitter tears, and the fantasy of what could have been.

Somewhere I fancy I could go through a little door, and it would be Nineteen Ninety-Nine again. Or Nineteen Eighty-Nine. I could sit with people who have vanished, disappeared--because, in the end, everyone does. EVERYONE.

You could waste the minutes together again, knowing those minutes are an unforgiving tick of the heartbeat of the world, as one scene, one dream fades into another. But you would no longer hurt; there would no longer be any pain. The world could spin around you in its concentric circles of TIME, vanishing moment by moment, as the shadows grow long across the face of the pavement, and the day gives way to nightfall. If you stand in one place long enough, can you make the world cease to revolve? "Everything ELSE is an illusion."

And you could recapture those castles in the clouds, that sense of what YOU wanted the world to be, what you expected it to be, held out with its palm open, offering you emptiness as you peered to see what it held inside its unforgiving grasp--it's wretched promises it never keeps, it's cheating ways.

There are one hundred words left. I could spew them from my mouth like hot lava if I so desired, but I believe, much like Rimbaud stated, "I have only 'pagan words' with which to express myself."

"It is for certain this is an oracle," states my dear sweet little Arthur, but he goes on to say, "I have only pagan words [...] so I'll shut my mouth."

Around me, to and fro, the ghosts come and go. "In the rooms, the women come and go," said T.S. Eliot in the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Jon use to quote that often; Jon went.

Vanished, Disappeared. A dream, finally, all of it. We delude ourselves. Time casts away all things into the yawning abyss. But we have our hypnosis, our illusions, our DREAM.

And here I STAND. Still.

But the clouds keep rolling on and on.

(Now: my favorite old music video)