I am welded to some distant realm
– unknown and unknowable, perhaps –
through a rope of light let down to me
by some wretched star immersed in utter darkness
and this darkness that makes it shine
also is the cause for our separation
for my star with all its light is heaven bound
from where it lures me with its ideals
polluting all my thinking with its fancy theory
of oh how different life could be
while I, here, at the other end of darkness,
retained by the practised way things are
still routinely walk on earthly ground
that is the cause of all my misery
that this rope of light soon formed a knot
of hope and fear around my neck
and the resulting noose of time
has since been fastening
and in that it is but consolation that my
gravity now lies with my dreams
for while my star draws me ever closer
this earth’s forces too cling on to me
and in this, my pending human situation,
determined by despair and captivation
with my identity stretched out between the two
I put this, my own humble life, forward
as an offering to some greater cause
while I remain hanging from my gallows star
I sometimes question the meaning of it all
and timidly pinch my arm, from time to time,
thinking to myself, “It cannot be.”
but also know for sure that, “No, I am not dead.”
at least not here, not now, not yet.
and as I gently swing, dangling
from the rope of light around my neck
I feel I have been lifted off the ground
an inch not more and yet I am already
on my journey t’wards the universe
by the graceful light of my gallows star
between the heavens and the earth
things are gradually compromised:
they are not how they could be
but already better than they were
for what once seemed dilemma now is me
and from an unknown place within
the calming knowledge gently rises
that, indeed, “I am alive! I am alive!”
just suspended in eternal crisis.
and although my Self remains forlorn
as a searcher I now have become my own creator
and a universal rumour has it that one day
this Self, it will be born. “I will be born.”
