The Lure of the Panflute

What can't be seen is everything else

A panoply of a universe unconnected to me

A blind panorama I enter, imperceptive

Of that everything

And those everythings

Who/that await me

***

Nocturnal footsteps are mine

By the grace of lunar guidance

Shafting through the canopy

In staccato flashes syncopating with

Twig snaps and panicky creature-scurrying underfoot

Like me

***

Mine--not the only steps

Must move forward so

I can't put my back toward it

My soft-side, exposed for punches to come

Into the unknown smells and sounds

And fears

***

A chilled, shard-filled ambiance

Hangs, horizontal, posting right-angle triggers

With Damocles poised, smiling

To shred my quest

Before passing unmolested, unharmed,

And--breathing still?

***

A panflute calls the vector to forward me

I raise each step to purchase precarious footway

And listen to each unconfirmed movement

Mine or, otherwise, caprine

A metered journey, carefully slow

And terrifying

***

So alone but, alone, not

A horned shadow mirrors each displacement

Of gravelly footfalls that announce

My tentative march toward the unknown

Entity who receives me expectantly

And angrily

***

Can vengeance come before I

Did-what-I-do to provoke it?

Can effect-precede-cause

And conclude-before-arrival?

Am I walking into a predetermination

Of peril, out of any rational order?

***

The panflute sounds as the music of panic

Weaves fugued with the sounds

Unseen-but-heard, heard-but-unrecognized

My center of gravity is fluid, unanchored

I'm in tesseract territory, none of it really here

Or friendly

***

There is an everything that threatens

In the dark and dank and unseen

Yes, seeing navigates the world--

But dark's hearing invites what's to come

From a world unseen and flows everywhen

Toward me

***

Everything and everywhen and everyone

Call to me from their horrific singularity

On a number line's eddy currents

Where both sides of zero cancel but don't forgive

Here-to-there is preposterous, yet there-to-here

Is what is the coming-for-me

***

You cannot be a bulwark to everything

You can only join the cacophony and mayhem

To teach those who follow

That every conquers any

And each-of-us are any who must yield to the every

Until we forget, careless, and thus perish

***

Turn around!

Put your back to it

You cannot/will not see it, happening

Everything-all-at-once

Unfathomed in panic

And Lovecraftian dreads

***

Pull the covers over your head!

Brace your soft-side 'gainst terra firma

And suffer what onslaughts come

By wedding the unknown

And making your conjugal bed

On the down of uncertainty