ways of world-ending

In high school, I admired T.S. Eliot for his ability to write dynamic, long pieces that never dragged. They were epics even without changes in setting. Most importantly, they were obviously experiential and had a succinctly human element to them. For example, we see in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

He’s documenting on an experience, and in that he encompasses a major concept in the philosophy of writing, that the writer, in virtue of documentation, never experiences, but is always outside the subject matter. That is not to say the writer does not have bias; in fact, the writer completes the bias, capturing the fleeting image of impression, the act carrying the feeling, rather than the feeling encompassing the act. There is something to say when a writer does not exhibit emotion in words, and rather actions. The passersby are intellectuals, amongst the immense design of things (to bring Willa Cather into the picture). Don’t actions speak louder than the verbalization of emotions?

I only introduce T.S. Eliot in order to justify my own document (-ary? -ation?). I wrote this a while back, high school or freshman year of college, and I arbitrarily assigned myself the task of writing what I mistook for an epic. Really, it was just a long-ass poem. I added Part 4 my freshman year to add more resolve. I almost crashed Word.

Enjoy.

The Living Day from the Eastern-Bound H.H.

Part I

As the overhead lamp has been carved into shade,

All enemies must have to be met to be paid

For the crimes of both days and both times

As your shepherd at this hour climbs.

So you think, so I perceive

My reason to so quickly leave.

Let the hero start at his home,

As I begin such a tome.

There’s this peace when I wash dishes

That allows me to think through wishes

I’d never have had before – done,

But nonetheless my thoughts were won.

By what else, than the memory of your nights

So gently gifted to me?  I see them in lights

Present all year, not the single

One, oh you know, the cold jingle.

It becomes obscene; so, make way, make haste

For an epic standing on your doormat’s waste

While you sip and gulp away, masking

Importance by walking and basking

What truth you held essential

To this product’s birth referential

Of irrelevant imposition, a great fight

For the screaming’s and interpretation’s fight!

Forget not the likes and fields covered

In the burning of trees that only hovered –

Yes, admittance requires saying only you were fooled

Into thinking such fires could be so quickly cooled.

The desperation on which you blame – nay, assume me

Will never be in your times of thinness through thee,

In repentance’s grace, as humankind speaks

With One Voice which smells the reeks

Of painfully slow and broken galleys

In your torn books’ valleys

Of your true greatest fear…

Your lies are but mere

Until some moron acts upon such vile things

And stuff.  Only then can such that spirit which brings

Us all a hereditary calm of silence;

And I turn back, with more compliance

Like this sponge absorbing water, soap, the unclean

And still so right, and make you all glean

Before the honors of fates and gods

And still receiving little courteous nods.

While I still take it.  I still take it

And simply receive the title to fake it.

Of course, blindness can never be affirmed

Unless you read by touch.  Even then, those that wormed

My life away from me without knowing my life

Might have chosen my clothes, food, wife.

And of course, my struggles and this quick strife.

Well, it’s not quick, it’s my life, and like this sponge,

I can only be stone and dry unless the plunge

Is taken, met, made into a life, my battle

Which shakes my existential foundations to rattle

Before my fire should die

And cause a broken lie

To ask for a hope.  Here’s a hope, there’s a hope,

But always remembering to use my soap.

The pain I have earned

Are from the lessons I have learned.

Part II

Here is where I wake up again,

And a mask made is the one I feign.

I always give better than I take,

Which explains this internal so fake.

A crime it is, nonetheless, for all adhering,

This shockwave that sends us fearing

Into the delight of another debate,

Furthering our hate.

One cleanses to release the aches of rest;

We do not want to inaction to infest.

It is where we rise as Apollo has wheeled

Across our sky, across this field

Which I defended with such ridden angst.

Verily, it was Apollo, I, that rose the ranks

And became what I woke up to become.

It becomes true for me – not for some.

Here where all roads lie, I cannot mar vision

For others.  If it becomes so, it is their decision.

Would some mistake in death or life make such

As I drive wheels across for which I ache so much?

It’s the back road I take, whether it becomes the main

Or the lost, I follow what I can to ease my bane.

This bane, however, is not poison that would

Penetrate my deepest neighborhood.

No, it’s not like that at all.

For there to be a rise, there must be a fall.

But which was first?  The demise or

The elevation at best of lies for

Our own progression.  Oh, the things for which worry

Does take hold, does take sacrifice.  It becomes a hurry

To feel the way I do now as I enter white walls

And see these blood ridden dolls

That wish nothing but sleep.  By midday, however,

They nudge awake their eyes and become clever,

Smart enough to take on what I give:

To defy death in an all they live,

To listen when no one can hear,

To stand by and release your peer,

To believe as if faith were alone,

To describe as artists can hone,

To write with conviction and taste of red,

To look in a pair of eyes and see the dead.

To finish what they have started.

Here, here I see where I have parted

From the likes of the great, from the voices of empires –

Is this where I was meant?  To be crowned with such liars?

It’s madness I see, it’s madness I commit!

Calm… calm I must be.  I should sit

And grate my meal and commune

Since I’ll return to chaos just as soon

As I begun such a day.  When I face this five

Times a week, I know this life as I am alive.

Such an existence they called,

And some hearing this are appalled –

Perfection.  Every hex that forms into one unity

Of encumbrance, of crosses burdened in impunity,

Together come unto the crossroads of this very existence.

What rex would now apply a resistance?

Only kings of hearts and queens of loss;

And then those who simply gloss

The truth for fun,

Thereby putting it to a gun.

For the truth is in greatness, and mocking a god

Is death by the brightest rod.

For now, work is resting.

All that waits is the home of testing.

Part III

Arriving at the rest unwelcome

Is my fate at its sum

Upon the rise of a familiar shadow in night.

Of course it’s night – it’s the hour in which I write,

Think the life’s problems and her solutions

As music fades in her humble dilutions.

In the forsaken weariness and regret,

I must win this recurrent bet

Of zero to one –

One to run,

Run, run, run away in a distance gone

Far away from my own front lawn.

I run into this place as if

I ran into a court, the plaintiff

Of discourses formerly known to purge

My only truth:  the ending dirge.

I call my story.

For all the glory

And here the hearth would be coldest;

And now the pendulum would be boldest

So as to charge the fields of contentment with dissent

Of the hypocrite’s reasons to arbitrarily regret

For a crime not committed, not condoned in the analects

I created for each of my persona, for each of their sects

That define the indefinite

And everlastingly implicit

For the day I started far too late

Leaves me weak and insatiate

For discipline of fate and the everyday relief

Under every Athenian olive tree leaf.

No gift from no divine somehow became antithetical

Until constantly the warrior kept finding his reticle

Turn every friend, mother, brother, and teacher into the wrong enemy

As every republic soon took care after another, until the hegemony

Knew no reason why it did not know,

Why there was no sorrow to show;

What is good for one man must be good for all, so it’s true

That the help once advised is become used in the lieu

Of the common sense, treatise, and freedoms of the Men inherent

To the very fabric of Men themselves, the Men who did parent

At one time truth to be told

Morals that never grew old

Until the bitterness of competition

Required a quite constant repetition

Of jealousy contained, kept with the reaches

Of actions’ brutal and irrational breaches.

No such protection exists for Man until he would earn this shield

Left in lost fortresses, left on top of buttresses, maintained in a weald

Free of fire, free of cultivation, and free of all truths made new

From the ones that did not come quite to

The benefits of the only mutation I’d ever known.

By the God of Time, this is what is meant to be alone.

Never fitted with Vulcan’s raiment,

I nakedly face the Titanic clamant

Not in the skies or the stars, or west of the world,

Or even in the modern mountains left uncurled,

Or in the restless quantities so vast in the Selion,

Or the ironic jungle left to courage’s rebellion,

Or even the skin, the crust, the peeling of the world as it comes home;

This is such a secret left undusted in the history, left unlearned of the tome

That precedes fear and hold nothing dear

And gives death nothing but a mere,

Soft glance,

A chance,

For something better to result in nothing left untainted.

Too many times the heart was too fainted

For the trekking through the gates Tartarian,

Far into the core of plasma and magma marrying,

Into the appearance not held until, until,

Until it is too late to be still

Well enough to read the Bible required blood to read,

And to believe the faith requiring truth to accede

With nothing and everything in the cosmic apparition

Of the politic innate to the inevitable partition

Leaving the heart, the heart so marred

To leave condition, to fall apart

Into the cycle left cold, dead, and dying

To want such a life, to be trying

Of the fate in every man, the gift of mortality,

And to write his own conclusive finality

Of the journey never meant for him,

Never meant to have lived in a whim

Of no reason,

Of every treason,

Of never wanting a life at all,

Of existing in a state of such appall,

Of fighting the oblivion in the beauty of Men,

Of never picking up the truth in every pen,

Of always falling, down and down again,

Of rarely ever seeing the brilliance reign

Of this very strife

Of her every life

Of the days meant to be had

Of the fears that led to nothing bad

Of the boundaries resilient

Of not needing to be prescient

Of the future in store,

Of giving up everything ever hope for

Of leaving the tablet alone to God,

Now to enter one’s own laud

With nothing short of a smile,

And everything more than the while

To forgive one’s self,

The spiritual pelf

Envied by none, endeavored by all

And at least there in the last Hall

For any snowed and bleeding sword

To finally embrace of the one Lord

Praised, believed, held so sublime,

Only believed by one soul at a time.

Now we can see and can believe

In the flight of fear, and can relieve

Our consciences from the apprehension –

Lies conceived are lies held in tension,

But together we provide comfort, and alone,

Well, alone, we find strength, should we be in the zone

Of true consciousness, rebelliousness, resistance,

Youthfulness, wisdom, and sheer pestilence

To a society unfulfilling, of course, that have emptied it

Of all the good deed and cleverness with wit

Accomplishing the dreams of children unborn.

These, however, are children without scorn,

Ones truly alive, aside from the cynicism,

Yet with no constraining mysticism

Conjured for a short-term resolve,

An answer born in dissolve

To an absolute searching

For absolution lurching

In the sink, the school, the house,

The child, the teacher, the spouse,

And all encompassed in the final series

Of established, of a long life with wearies

That stretch beyond any – and mine –

Imagination.  More like tine,

Than a rose, we find it by touch and feeling,

Not by a gentle and, possibly, careful peeling

Of layers as if though this life were a book

Taken by masters, the bishops, the rook,

For a final assault on the king

That simply couldn’t bring

The life back into a life forgotten,

The anecdote of the rotten

Smell of oblivion.  Scriptures pass,

And Scriptures come, but it is the completion

We must see, the picture in frame, no deletion

Of the details that paint in every color,

Even those that appear duller,

For we must see all to practice,

Quite painful like a desert cactus,

We must see nothing to believe,

Like a passenger not received,

And become not one mind,

Or body, or soul, but find

Ourselves in one entity, ready,

For the growth so solemnly steady.

We rise, and we fall,

Like humans, greatest of all

That lived to die, that lived to hate,

And lived to do what makes them great.

From stones to iron, from steel to lightning

And the world still brightening,

We will have a hope, and should all the world implode,

Scatter, and leave no book or trace, the code

Of hope will stand in the hearts of beings far and wide,

Never to, like us in bitterness, collide.

We are dead, and we are alive,

But nothing will keep us in the jive

Of treason to deepest good,

Melted into the softest wood

And fallen from the thousand branches out of our hearts.

That one story, that one victory, is all our part.

Deep inside us, there is always good.

And to do good, eventually, we would.

Over again, without fear, over again,

With absolutely nothing to gain.

This, my friends, is the Lord in every heart

And He, always present, would never be apart

In the tenet to always have the gates open to –

Well, you would know; wouldn’t you?

Part IV

Were the answer not obvious initially,

The truth must come out provincially

Into the hearts of the readers, of the seekers,

And of the lovers, the last I call meeker

From disappointment, for they should know best,

That the gates of love are nothing more than a pest,

Since life is not as beautiful if we can provide ourselves with rest.

In the end of despair and the beginning of fear,

In the sheer gain of doubt and to hide with a leer

The remarks we wished never came before –

But my friend, we have, and will evermore.

It becomes the true warrior, nay,

The poet? – not the kind that brings dismay,

But, the one who proclaims in terra pax,

Who has picked and hacked all those locks

We feared in childhood and mocked in maturity.

There is no real proof for our aloof surety,

Other than that a voice still speaks,

Always will, and will ring through peaks,

And hillsides, towers and bridges,

Forests and rivers, and the ridges

Will not fault in a quake, but break the armor

Of the enemy, and we will not spill blood for

The sake of it, but will call on the protest of Fate,

Yes, that enigma we found easy to loathe and hate,

Now believed to be an ally.

No, fool, we have to rely

On nothing but ourselves.

In this arena, he delves,

She creates,

We berate,

I insinuate,

You tirade,

And the Enlightened One finds.

This is the meaning of humankind.