The Day I Died Was A Day Like Any Other
The day I died was a day like any other.
The sun peaks over the horizon and paints
the dew drench trees with a warm red glow.
The birds sing and the garbage truck jockeys
loudly through the asphalt streets as routine
as any other day. The city slowly stirs
from its slumber as men with ties rush
to jobs and women put on makeup
in bathroom mirrors.
Bedhead and bloodshot eyes I’m alive
as a cigar ash falls in my morning coffee
that I sip anyways despite the blunder.
And while tv’s flip on in households
across the land, I head down into
the dark forest of myself,
down near that cosmic stream
of the unconscious,
where,
after many hours
of toiling,
great visions
are revealed.
What does it all mean?
Saint and sinner
in love too much
and not at all.
Pushing against the boundaries of
this manufactured reality,
beyond definitions and classifications
and beliefs, untamed by your rigid notions
of morality and dogmas, yearning
to transcend the limited lens of the
cultural perspective, floating in and
out of the realm of the universal spirit,
outside the systematized existence
of the modern world, wedged between
two generations, dove and raven,
on the verge of the
inescapable,
my voice
my voice
my voice
which is all I got, echoing
down the corridors of the
sacred and profane,
torn between a desire to soar
and a duty to stay, watching
as the old world fades
and my spirit ascends
into
the unitary flow
of the ancient
wind.
This all came to me in a
rapturous roar of silence
as I laid half-naked
under the pines
in the mere darkness
of a moonlit night.
There was no one around.
I felt the cosmos in my veins
that particular night.
I just lied there on a ground
of pine needles
breathing in the untainted
scent of the forest
as the stars danced
in the dark. I watched
one dart across the midnight
sky and disappear into the ether.
Billions of years old that star
was and it was gone just like that.
We’re merely a camera flash in the dark.
A blip in the grand scheme of time,
one breath among the infinite.
Would you live
your life over
again
given half
a chance?
The day I died was a day like any other.
