in this infinite domain,
the bitter and dreary wilderness,
a fork with two well-tread paths awaits me:
do i accept my fate and surrender to the cage,
or bash against the bars like an animal in a kennel
with my whole entire being
until i can no longer resist?
this binary is certainly enough
to shatter the human spirit
in a million tiny pieces
that can never be reassembled.
but, if i refuse to let my eyes adjust
to the dazzling assault to my sensorium
radiating from the road of resignation, then
just barely, i can make out the faintest glow
of yet another pathway —
one scarcely tread before
prickled with lacerating thorns
and oh, so obscure and lonely,
with its muddy stream impeding every step,
leading to the ☼ne source
from which all things derive and depend.
dare i reach in my back pocket
and procure my only tool,
a blunted machete,
and hack away brush,
in search of the exit?
the rancid earth beneath my feet is sinking.

we were lying side by side
in a narcotic haze
when you struck my glassy eyes
with your psychotropic gaze
and this self-imposed, rotting,
opulent prison
was raided by the biting dogs
of manumission.

the ancient oak on which we sit aflame,
tempestuous acid gales corroding oxytocic bonds,
our vision tapers and our candles dim.
mist blackens, seems to conceal not an arcadia but
an impending age of infinite death,
destruction, despotism — desert…
a regime of cruelty, until mercy strikes:
the tree’s reduced to ashes, the crackling ceases
with a final pathetic wheeze
from the last of the moisture trapped inside the wood.
doubtless, this is a clear vision
if we opt to gaze into the fire, divining, mourning.
but, perhaps our candles are really very stubborn,
perhaps our links too strong to deliquesce
from hollow, barking winds, mere blunted whispers,
or acquiesce to the great slaughterbench.
and perhaps it may well be that utopia exists
in the domain of triangles and rhombuses —
waiting to be summoned,
aching for birth,
needing to be —
and yes, perhaps, it, like the ideal shapes,
has no place in the world of scum & dirt & imperfections,
but perhaps our absurd Sisyphean struggle
as the midwives of an eden of our own
is a three-sided triangle,
the fire a pale moon ignorant of the dawn,
each tiny light a dogged, radiant sun.
and now, a final, urgent observation:
the longer that we sit and stare
at the spectacle of the flame,
the faster it grows and multiplies;
the harder it is to contain.