Questions

I wouldn't know how to start
Being
Truly in the world
Instead of alongside it
A diligent spectator
Swallowing truths as if they belonged to me
Swathed in sympathy and couched in complacence
With the world's calculated demands
Unwilling
To step inside the world's Me as Myself
Rather
Than one of the many assigned identities
Sheathed within the time and place of chance's choosing
Crudely camouflaged
Knowing that to start
Being
Would remove the shroud
And reveal

Nothing

Who am I?

Am I the dark?

Am I the light?

Or something in between

Is there even an in-between to be?

Or is that just a convenient illusion

Cast to protect the feeble mind of a lost man

From his own sin?

Is there a choice?

Would we want one?

And if faced with the choice of who to be

What would we decide?

And how long would that choice protect us from how we were made?

There’s something in me

Pulling at the seams of this fatal shell.

Something not hidden but not entirely seen

That hides half its ugly head while clawing from the dark.

It clouds the mind

And corrodes the soul within.

What part does this cruel-thing play

If not to provide passage to the devil himself?

His careful harbinger, 
Always waiting behind the eyes, 
To strike.

It will not leave me.

Though it seems my body should reject this vile thing

It loves it.

More wholly than it loves the world.

And the love it shares is not the love of man

But the seed of peril.

Growing, twisting, seething,

Corruption at its core.

Yet struggle brings it closer,

Tightening its sickening grip

Until all seems lost

Until I am lost.

But though it takes the body,

The soul

That bright, smooth crystal at the heart of things

Buried deep

Walled and Locked by so many years of fear

Yet stands protected.

It’s innocence long gone,

Its sole focus, being.

It will not be penetrated or coaxed by this long fingered thing

But will wait

Until it’s branches wither and its fingers fail

And its legs corrode and its grasp twists free

And it will emerge..

Confused

Still

And though it know not its own heart

It knows it’s life is its own

Its light, though obtruded, ethereal, weak

Still protrudes the darkness

Illuminating a pale gray in the mind’s endless night.

And though it wavers, flickers, and bows

It is wholly present

As it presents itself to the world 

And asks

Who am I?