What then?

I am a dead man, yet I live. The life that transpires is of deceit to the neighbor whom in seldom trepidation allows the passing of time to be clearly marked by the deceit -not planned- of this age.

I died long ago in another country. My body and person went seeking to honor freedom. What returned was an empty carcass that harbored an emptiness and a desire I today share with everyone around me; that is what returned.

The cry inside me is loud and although deafening the hoarse whispers that throw me off balance as my ears aching make my whole body tremble ask them to cease if only for a moment. However, the boat has no mast, no captain, no passengers, or need any longer as it aimlessly wanders about the vast ocean.

Perilous the nature of my atonement as I look at the horizon looking to find the darkness I carry with me, but see nothing but the clear sun staring me back. I cannot stand this clarity much more. Momentous the cataclysm that tore, shredded, and disposed of my intellect and left only something vaguely resembling vanity. Not just any type or apparent vanity. For as with many other things in this special life, there are categories and one must carefully search within them all in order to find not what one seeks, but what one should have seen or found long ago. Because it is in this blindness, it is in that failure that the killing occurs. The already dying person has their wound slowly picked and poked, and opened and searched, and torn and emptied.

We can only take but so much before we truly stop empathizing with ourselves and the reason behind our reasoning. For all that is should have been, but perhaps no longer should in that new things should usurp those remaining and establish what they must. I can not protest the ill desires that live inside the thoughts I do not manage. For in observation I can fathom of a painting a myriad of cultivating analogies and synergistically bring forth a new that could not have transpired should the very act not taken place. Retrospectively, the rendering of an image in a gallery, such as images go therein, for the purposes of an example do not evote the type of sentiment, deep desire, or resonating contemplative effort that a real one does -not in this day and age of the 21st century that is.

I must, perhaps should, and clearly will attempt a new method to resolve this failing desire that resides deeply within my essence, in my being. I am not I, in as much as I was once I can no longer see that, and understand I am not he, for he I do not know as he is another altogether, and cannot be you, because you are dead.

As I stare into the empty mirror, my empty thoughts racing towards the obscurity of it all, I wish to grab hold of something. I don’t believe I ever wished for death. Then my thoughts take me to an even darker place, recollection. In recollection’s alley I walk and bereft of direction I find the agonizing truth behind my previous lie. Truly I did wish for death before, perhaps as I do now. I wonder, what then?