Walking in the dark,
Night rolling out ahead.
Inked world seeped and soaked in sable hues.
Blind,
But listening through the rain for an arrival.
Puddles suddenly jumping over boots,
Hair sodden and stretching over a face.
Pit in the stomach,
Pitch of black,
Sky pitted of moon.
Lit windows at this time of night are for those who sit in front of blue-gray screens.
Faces fallow with borrowed light,
The bottle lifting,
As if it knows how to console the solitude.
They don't know what true loneliness is.
Never empty enough to notice what they're full of.
My aloneness is empty of me.
And all its counterfeit companies.
I sit at my desk,
Light bulb hot.
Against the glass pane.
Some winged creature is being displayed in all her delicacy.
Small iridescent shape.
Glistening against the dark body on the outside,
Thinking this is the sun.
I want to tell her it isn't.
But it feels cruel to deny her hope.
I try to write,
But leave the line unfinished,
Get up and switch the light off.
Not because I don't care,
But because I have circled too many smaller suns in this life.
To believe this one might complete us both.
There are so many substitutes for what is truth.
I have known many,
Believed in their bottomless promises,
Given my life away for small,
Insufficient sons.
And it is a thin life.
We feel this,
Never complete,
Never arriving,
Never at rest.
The Surge's most innocent.
But in my own strange experience.
Only the real has satisfied,
Lasted,
And remained.
The real is the self,
Not the self we have been defending and maintaining and obeying.
But the reality of there being no fixed and separate me.
I am the darkness in the dark.
The selfless unity of all that is.
And we share that being.
Awareness is our true nature,
Not the self,
Although it appears in us and must not be denied.
Because nothing is denied when we are truly ourselves.
The hole within us that we are always searching to fill is not a particular shape.
If it were,
It would look like mystery.
Mystery so unknowable,
So between the lines of certainty.
We wouldn't think to look there.
Not knowing exactly what you are,
How you came to be,
What this life is and where this is all going.
That is the fulfillment the deepest ache in us is searching for.
But we keep placing things inside it,
Certain we have found the right fit and more certain the longer we hold it awkwardly there.
Rather than resting inside the whole itself.
Inside its beautiful unknown.
And inside the emptiness of it.
We find everything.
