egress from a brightly lit land (part 1)

we take small steps out from what
many like to say is a dark
nightland
a dim graphite-hued landscape
where everything is dead and faded

the truth is
it's very bright
too bright
bright enough to delineate the most
strangling detail in hyperfocus
both lies and truths
illuminated with equal shading
spoken crisply and eloquently and
the faces of the past aren't as
some sloppy distressed watercolor
but really a professionally animated decoupage
individualized and bordered and
sharply recalled
ready to bleed the vomit of your own
magnificent fuckups directly into your
mouth
twisting your own language
torturing you
slicing off your cock
digging beautiful dragon's teeth of glass
into your starving arms wet and pliant and welcoming as
egg custard
laughing delicately then
heartily til you find
yourself horrifically laughing back

we drag our way through the technicolor
trying to understand it at first

well
trying to understand it for a
really
long                               long
while
we ponder it
we arm ourselves intellectually against it
then with it
helping it for a while
then we combat it again in
a kind of schizophrenic musical trench warfare
catching ourselves by our own thrown projectiles
it could be months lived like this
elongated and tallied by the measures of
sleepless eternal evenings
clutching our cold brains
fraught with dreams of justice and reconciliation
dramatic gestures devised
celebrations of delicate grandeur
deadeyed
zombified by what we lack

to pursue a jagged path through we
generate the loveliest distractions:
other people
the centers of our bodies
intoxications and pharmaceutical delights
flickering entertainments
twitch dopamine carousels
riding the hypothalamus bareback and hitting
every obvious obstacle right at the fucking knees
progress is pitilessly slow and mired
sometimes we turn around and are being chased
sometimes we are chasing the stoic end of the day
sometimes we are chasing the fragile morning
sometimes we find we are simply running for some time

you would think that when we hit the gate we
crash heroically through it with
all this stored kinetic energy and
the fury of the chase but
this land never moves and though everything in
this land is moving nothing is moving and
we get there right at the edge of it and
this is probably where we stay the longest
and this
is probably
where many others
still
live
and we think
about that
and we are
no longer
moving