CCXLI - regrets

A regretful pathos snuck up on me this morning, as I lay in bed half awake. I suppose I allowed it to lie with me.  It happens, but perhaps it hasn't happened for such a long time that I never thought of it happening.  I think it's the reflective, self-inflected deliberation of the past few days, some part of the conversations at night I've had with Adeline.  Things talked about which I don't have an answer for.  Well, no, the answer lies with me. 

Cher's song came on the radio once. It's such a classic, it goes, if I could turn back time! That's all it needs to say. Boom, you're sucked in. And her grand old hurting voice, so proud.Singers always have these tragi-comedic Greek theater lives, I almost assume she's got one too. The truth is I think listening to her song made me pensive, and thus off like Dante, irresistibly, to the pits. That's the difference between radio and everything else. Radio has true magic. When it comes alive, the moment is yours, and you take it. I don't even think it's magical, it's actually religious.

And here's the torch you have to carry in the descent, telling left from right. Do you think that life would be better if your choices at the time were more carefully taken? Or do you flee from such moral cowardice?Because the things you chose to do were those you wanted to do, given the circumstances, given the person you were, your perception of those persons you had in front of you. Being now your own Virgil, do you wish your younger Dante had acted with more wisdom? But let's not pretend; it's such a tempting pit to plunge into. Irresistible. Never-mind something so pedestrian as buying the lottery a day earlier; think about all the people you love who you could have loved more, all the girls you've left behind. Words, names, places, and faces; sunbeams, scenery and songs evoking passions left behind.

Maybe you could have fixed some things, but think about the enormity of life as it goes on around us.The daunting immutability of our own relationships in the present. And meaning wafts, does it not, it takes shape in the moment at which it was conceived. What was meaningful to you then, what you wanted to do for pure, if not good, reasons, would you change those things, just so that things turn out a different way? Would you then betray yourself tomorrow? The truth is, maybe you weren't the person for it at the time. Well, no, you weren't. Not a man good enough. That's the thing that haunts me, finally, but also the dregs that spare me agony. The tide rises and turns,  smoothing over sand-prints underfoot, and you leave the water a different person, that's all.

Some days it might seem other choices were better. But you, as you are, weren't there.

CCXL - No Longer Rule

A rolling gray palls over the mid-day afternoon,
Near land covered in forbidding cloud, yet as not threatening to burst.
The air thick, and treacly. Damp arms, moist necks, circled breaths,
Like so many pulls of wool to conceal the maw; heavy, rank and stifling. A cocooned jaw.
A muffled inhale, weak to sate weary nostrils, slow to flood a slow-pulsed heart.

The air is still. Not so the land.
It hums again with loud insistence. Now softly purring, now richly whirring,
A land returned once again to its own dominion, mastered by great and small.
And if all are masters could yet any be masters? Or none, it matters not,
The old lords long departed, they who thought themselves kings.
Ages did they roam, unseeing, unconcerned, even unhappily. What men are happy kings?
Now they are fled, withdrawn to their castles, no portals, no gates, no footmen on the bridges.
Desolate, isolate, incommunicate. Hungry, pacing, unkempt. Nowhere to go; too bad.

The world to its former glory; see now, gold adorns the tops of trees.
Coloured wings glimmer, festive, grasping now a stalk of ripened grass-seed, worrying now an upturned flower.
A thick buzz emanates, fitting and stopping, then plying unchallenged. For how else shall the Master Grasshopper win his spurs.
Old giants, the trees decline to sway, ancient songs written in thick lines on their bark will not be sung today.
No conductor leads them, no reed ticks off little tremors of rhyme and tenor.
For the air is still, pristine, insistent in its steady majesty;
Time paused but always alive in mysterious animus.

A living carpet verdant sprawls far afield, it needs no spinning.
Underfoot lies its web of trailing tendril, above the surface, a tickling, fuzzy rug of live strands.
Pervasive yet not proud, though it conceals a true kingdom;
Regal are the insectalia, noble though crawling on their bellies, rightful though they nose closely the ground.
Varied are its populaces, shy now under raised green blades, curious now though the stone settles on their backs,
Each to their task, thus forming a polis of unimaginable strength and depth.

Subterranean, a murky underworld of suspicion, subterfuge, and predation.
Yet all in survival, the golden rule, better yet than any other invented. Needs be.
So all is fair, in death all are equal;
If one feeds on another his kin need not visit vengeance on the other. Only needs be.
No office polices misdemeanours here, no agency surveils miscreants.
All beasts being angels, each according to their own kind, trusting the better angels of their nature.

Alive, all are alive, and who is left to say how well it is.
The world deprived of Man, then abandoned to his devices. To spiral into an empty house, only his soul.
Who has fed poorly in the summer of his strength, thieving on needs more desperate than his own.
Now emptied, his cupboard lies bereft, all things left apart, the centre does not hold.
Needs he sup on the abuses of old age, poorly he tends over his decline.

Anger, raking over the last ashes of bygone glory.
Slow the fire that smoulders to its destruction,
Furious the embers that feed their blind hunger, dance their final kalinka, swarm to the inevitable, their oblivion.
See enraged creation squirm, desperate, life slipping from its grasp.
And yet, to what end? No fist in anger ever saved a life worth changing,
No history worth recall rescued in a pique of maddened impulse,
No chorus penned by latin hands echoed in the sighs of travelled wind.

Let slip, let fall, let disappear, let return, let end.
And return again to eternal nature, its voices to reign for time, times and half a time.
Till all is renewed, and forever be, man no longer.