Caliban

There was a precipice to the right of me

and on the left, paths, followed by men,

then goats, then no-one,

led up to a summit lost in cloud.

I mulled it over.

Annihilation or transformation?

I chose a middle way, and lived my life.

I had opted to survive, or so I thought.

But slowly I found myself defined by my defects,

by damage I gradually accumulated,

by deviance I discovered and kept hidden,

and secret disappointments, buried in shame, 

where a sense of thwarted entitlement

corroded and hollowed out my morality,

until I became everything I wasn't.

I noticed music, once a joy and refuge,

became its own peculiar kind of masochism:

it was my soul's complaint, singing in captivity,

within the unruly gaol I had made of myself,

singing over the riot for want of silence

where it might find freedom,

and it ceased to delight me.

I understood freedom just well enough

to let me choose what to give up freedom for,

and the infinite thoughts that intersect

and tangle and bind our limited hours on earth

became a house of clouds that I was lost in

even as I stood proudly by my own hearth and mantel,

and a swarm of bees that persecuted me

even as I hid cowering behind the waterfall.

We spend time in unspoken knowledge of each other,

escaping to worlds created when our eyes meet,

where we embrace, and in our embrace is gathered

countless lost scintillations culled from every star,

and we are found there by a happy chance

and thank that good fortune

that sweeps our dying embers into this embrace,

giving us just one chance to revive them

and define ourselves as something else,

one last chance to find in another

what we have lost,

because it transpires there is no middle way.

There is no peak.

There is no precipice.

There is no destination

to which to plot a course or find a path on this island.

All our beacons lie toppled by the wind.

All their ashes spill upon the ground.

All that remains on the island is that wind,

and a slow withering exposure,

undergrowth coiling around your ankles,

endless mist,

and in your thinning, cloudy blood,

the merciless countdown of the years,

their depletion leading to decrepitude and death.

So what is to be done? How are we rescued

from the pale moonlit ruins of this shattered Pharos

which our false promise to ourselves made us seek

and has now become just one more hazard to avoid

with no light to lead the way,

now our betrayal of ourselves is complete?

The crutch needs the cripple as much

as the cripple needs the crutch.

Misfortune's legacy is a life without lies.

We must rely now on an illiterate, feral kind of love,

and borrow its appetites to sustain and nourish us,

because we have intruded on its habitat with our lives

in our futile quest to win some other salvation.

Here the false dichotomies of success and failure

are a foreign tongue, noise and gibberish to be ignored

while leaf and tree and rock and stream speak clearly

and we survive our passing and obliteration without blinking,

in every intrepid, opportunistic root that presses through our flesh

where our blood once coursed, and every birdsong

that is carried on the air that we once breathed.