You stand at creation’s sacred shore…
and stare out and over the ocean’s enormity…
with nothing to size and compare it to…
but the depth, the desert, of your own delusions and dreams…
the abyss of your folly and fantasies…
the evolving, unconscious, cosmos in your mind…
your dark matter, your dark energy, your lost horizon…
your questionable compassion, humanity, history and honesty…
all that you clearly know…
you’ll never fully comprehend…
You welcome the rolling, rushing waves…
while they pass over your naked, frivolous feet…
as if they were newborn possibilities…
messengers of meaning and purpose…
gods and angels of hope and love…
saviors in a watery disguise…
but then, like life and death…
they return to the womb of wonder…
and you feel yourself slowly sinking…
into the empty void of omnipotent oblivion…
You’ve heard it said before…
“Man is a child picking up shells…
on the shore of the ocean of truth”…
I am heavy and weighted down with shells…
troubled and tormented, by my own terrible truth…
I no longer wish to divine, to dowse, to discover…
the hidden treasures of time…
the buried secrets of eternity…
the amber rooms of infinity…
the hallowed halls of heavenly bliss…
I am a cretin uncaged, unchained, unleashed…
rude, righteous, ravenous, unrelenting and unrepentant…
I do not favor fortune, fables, fantasy, fools or forgiveness…
I feed off the breath, the thoughts, the knowledge, the ideas…
of other serious, secretive, sad, seductive idiots…
I eat their brains, their hearts, their courage, their fears…
their calculated confirmations, their wily, wishful wisdom…
I sink my teeth into their skepticism, their optimism, their platitudes…
their assured, unwavering estimates, pronouncements, predictions…
their promises, postulates, time-tables, truths, and theories…
I grind them up in my critical, contemptuous, jealous, jagged jaws…
and laugh aloud at their cries, their whimpers, their moronic, moanful misery…
I ignore their pathetic protests, their passionate pleas, their pensive, pointless prayers…
their electrical, evangelical, eternal excuses and ambitious, amplified, anomalies…
I enjoy watching them squirm, squeal, and suffer…
while I swallow them whole and alive…
then throw them up and spit them out…
on the unforgiving floor of a far off fractured future…
along with the beautiful shells, the very beautiful shells…
that used to thrill and fascinate…
I’m finished fishing for frivolity, fidelity, finality, and faith…
magic and mystery, amusement or a Muse…
I will never again wish to hum and harmonize…
with the mad music of the singing spheres…
let the drunken planets spin and wobble…
in their ever so boring, ambiguous orbits…
let the speechless stars spiral, burn, and explode…
into the cold, dreary, dust of calamity and chaos…
let the nebulae give birth to another trillion orphans…
the Universe is hungry, expanding and obese…
I stand at creation’s sacred shore…
and stare out and over the ocean’s enormity…
the rush of the inland seeking surf…
tickles my curious, trepidatious toes…
the powerless experience of my own insignificance…
is suddenly alive and ironically liberating…
but when the playful, infant wave, runs and returns to its mother…
sucks and sweeps the sand from beneath me…
and I stagger and struggle to find my breath, my balance, my being…
my only truth, my only reality, is Liquefaction…
End.
(c) Billy Batson, Saber-Tooth Poems
