Alter ego

We will have to be together apart, in silence,

and find each other in the stillness of our lives.

We have discovered that everything we craved,

everything felt deprived of when we were young,

is not worth having. We transgressed every convention,

flouted every petty foible, ignored every remonstrance,

and all we found is that they have no power,

and Everest itself is a molehill.

                               

The hurdles we vaulted in life melt behind us.

There is no achievement to be had.

Every crime we secretly excused with the redress

we thought accomplished by its commission is pardoned. 

The lacerations of guilt are tucked away,

folded into the deepening wrinkles of fading memory,

hiding with forgotten horrors in the shadows

that rise between every ridge in the fingerprint,

every gyrus of the brain.

The task of taming the world becomes

an act of nostalgia for our own youth.

We would have to violate the summit of Kailash

before we are able to find that mustang moment

that does not cower and kneel, already secretly tame

before the test of our notorious presence.

I murdered love on the altar of ego,

burned children's tears to fuel my joy-ride,

to sparkle and fizz with the transgressions of youth

was my promise, but I was an imposter.

We are all imposters.

Life is a doomed rear-guard action against entropy

made precious by futility,

and after constant strenuous effort of the soul,

with no hint of remission,

we are left with nothing to show

but this miracle of fatigue through which we sink,

each inching towards death

in our own little pool of quicksand,

and we take our monsters with us to the grave.