Pardon my breaststroke
over oblivion,
but the undertow will take me
inevitably
in time,
not with my eager acceptance, thank you,
but with mortal fatigue,
meanwhile your undead body
bloat-floats complacently
over oblivion,
coming eventually
to ashen shores
so you may make
ash angels
after having razed the world
and all of its myriad “illusions”,
attempting to delight in the
ruination
of the
joys to be had
rather than throwing yourselves
upon the pyres
and giving resolution
where your philosophy’s resolution is due.
You wish to beat us down
with the bones of the departed,
striking our hopes with a cruel
tattoo of
“You too! You too!”
as if we were not aware
that even headstones crumble,
given time;
and, yes, we know that
we ride determinism’s
compulsive waves
along the continuum of life—
it is no hollowing revelation.
Excuse me,
but while you numbly nestle
into the shoreline’s ashes
after you have smote all meaning
in your estimation,
and while you stubbornly mutter
your mantra of “malignant uselessness”,
I cannot help but note the irony
of your continued existence;
for while you champion mass extinction,
the puppet does not burn himself
to cinders
to rescue himself from the supposed
“conspiracy against the human race”.
Actions speak louder than words,
and you seem quite disingenuous
while you gleefully lob
Molotov cocktails into the sea
like bottled letters
meant to reach distant shores.
It is an ironic joke, you know—
the one about the
self-professed nihilist
who refuted his own thesis
by showing up
in person
for the book signing.
Yes,
we are meat puppets
tangled up in our own strings,
but only you seem to be
high-strung about it.
Then again,
strumming other people’s
heart-strings
has always been lucrative,
even if money and ambition and
etcetera
further the delusion
you decry.
Perhaps you should use the ashes
as eyeliner
for your late-term
Emo phase?
Meanwhile,
I will make my sand castles
as I please.
Somehow I doubt your
ash castles will last long,
and, besides, wet ash
burns the hands
which shape it,
yet will never clean the hands
of the hypocrisy
that stain them.
Tag: existentialism
The Mind/Body Relation/Ship
I am captain of this ship of bone and blood,
overseeing its sails of sinew, its wheel of nerves,
and it rides the great ocean of Life, that grand flood
of experience, for I am the master whom it serves.
Lord of my vessel, I do as I think I please,
charting a course for a fabled treasure hoard,
and while sailing these seven sensorial seas
I discover a coffin, by chance, and haul it aboard.
Curious for coin, I open the casket to discover
no coin, but a woman who has no beating heart;
yet she rises and embraces me, like a lover,
and tells me her name is Francine Descartes.
I know not what to think of her, or her cool skin,
for while she is beautiful, there seems something strange
in her eyes, and her movements, as if within
her heart there is a hollowness of human range.
Yet, strange as she is, she does me no harm,
and wishes to do little more than to dance
round and round in clockwork circles, arm in arm,
keeping rhythm with me—yet so odd in her glance.
While dancing on deck with this flotsam daughter,
I cannot tell if she is made of flesh or of wood
and so, curious, I throw her out into the deep water
and watch her float—as I would float if I could,
but such heavy thoughts now weigh upon me
and doubt makes me pause at the edge of starboard
to stare at my ship’s reflection upon the open sea,
knowing that the ship is my soul, too, my mind thus moored
in that flawed flesh; and no matter how I plot this trip
body and mind are as one, the same, ever together
so that the captain always goes down with his ship—
always, inevitably, even if he prays for halcyon weather.
More frightening, I think of Theseus and his long-lived boat
and the paradox of his many-timbered hull
and wonder if I have replaced myself while afloat
in the brain fluid of my waterlogged skull.
So many timbers have rotted and cracked and sank
during my journey’s course heretofore…
Perhaps “I” should just walk the plank
and become another shipwreck on the ocean floor.
