Days end. sun falling,
gone behind the distant
hills. I watch the vibrant
colors, spread across the sky,
days dying tribute to the fast
approaching night, and wonder,
at the beauty of days dying, and
the lighting of the stars, bright specks
of light, shining in the dark.

Quiet, gentle daughter,
for the day is beginning,
and we have yet to pray,
to the many thousand
beginnings come and gone,
lost to the faded past,
and to those that shine ethereal,
that light of change and promise,
of tomorrow's new day.

The lonely notes flowing, falling, leap from
The thin and flitting fingers of the pianist,
The cup of melancholy, drained to the
dregs, bittersweet in that the love of happiness
and joy is tempered now, from longing for the
delicate and pensive feel, that comes from dipping into
the small and lonely pool of melancholy. Grief, a distant
specter, hovering in the fringe of chance, is nearer now,
melancholy, the doorway, slides open on silent hinges,
and admits the crushing tide. High, high, and faster still,
the pianist falls, slowly down and up again, grief, the storm,
disrupts the flow of sound and silence, and incorporates itself
into the threading melody, and so erodes the shores of joy and laughter,
the violet waves of gentle melancholy, laced with the thinnest threads of
blackest grief, sighing on, erasing so, youth and joy and light and life.
The melody falters, stills. The pianist alone, playing for an empty quiet,
rises, pauses, his fingers brushing, the cold steel of empty death, smooth beneath his touch. He grasps it, lifts it to face him, hands steady, gaze unfaltering. The man is still, pianists fingers gripping that instrument of death, and time passes, unheeded, ignored. In a motion refined to elegance by the passage of time and repetition, the pianist places that cold instrument of steel and intent gently, down upon the polished black. He straitens, slowly, and settling his black overcoat close around him, he turns, walks quietly to a closed and silent door, lifts the latch, and into a swirling night of snow and light, walks out, and closes the door behind him with a soft and quiet click. And all is silent.

Spring,
time of life, of heat, beginnings
growings, season of joy, I do not
celebrate your warmth, nor rejoice
your heralding of summer, your bringing
of the fresh new growth. For I am tired, and weary
of the world, and sleep seems a balm, a soothing remedy,
And I shall go to it, when my time has
passed. As Spring must pass into Summer, Summer into Fall,
Fall into Winter, so will the seasons pass, and the whitening and
the shortening of the days come closer, ever closer, while I wait
amidst the eddies and swirls of youth and life and joy, buffeting me like
waves whipped to fury by the wind and lashing rain. Waiting, I stand.
Waiting I fall. Waiting I rise again, and wait once more for the season of silence
and darkness and soft tranquility, cool in its embrace, long in its passing.
Waiting I, for the Winter cold, and the shortening of days, and the silence over
all, imposed by death, and the frozen heart of life and joy.

The crying notes tear my soul, the wailing of babes
crying without comfort, abandoned and alone on the
desolate emptiness of the plain imagined, stretching on
into emptiness and infinity, while the plaintive shrieks
of the dying infants, innocent in this world of simplicities,
life and death, heat and frost, summer and winter, kindness
and cruelty, they rise in the thin air, cutting across the silence
like jagged knives, while the demons scream in the tortured
vaults of hell, the spirits condemned groaning in their agony,
while above the vultures circle, lowering, lowering, down into
the screams of the innocent, newly cast onto the flat plain of
mortality and death, down, their great wings cutting off the sun
as their claws reach down, down to rend and grasp and tear and
clutch; to spill the fresh blood to gush and stream, and feed the hunger
of the earth, beaks rising and falling and rising again, rising and falling,
till there is nothing. Nothing, and nothing and nothing and nothing!!
And yet. Though visions such as these terror my thoughts and whisper
to me in my dreams of the inevitability of death and of the abundance of
pain, of the rightness of grief, yet I continue and yet am I strong, unbroken
by myself, unbowed by myself. And yet. The walls are crumbling. Stones
fall to be devoured by the empty night, while the eroding wind of pain tears
through my mind and casts down the towers of impregnability while the wall
groans and buckles. Soon it will fall. The pain will become reality, blood will
spill out from the black depths of my mind to stain the world, and the vultures will
begin to circle, to fall, to tear. To ****. I will fall. Unless I contain these blasphemies of
thought, these profanities of my mind, I will fall. And death will claim me, and cast
me screaming into the black void of the empty night. And I will cease. That is all.

A man was broken, his heart was sore.
Leaving, he said with backward glance,
to family dear and loathed alike, pain
is good and love is better, both are teachers,
love of life, the finite stretch, the final breath,
spring and winter. But in excess, both are bad,
to drown a soul and leave it dead, one has only
to take in excess. And so I leave you now, gone
am I forevermore.

And he left.

Weary, footsore, he walked the road, and searching
sought for greater meaning, to a life turned suddenly
devoid of reason. He'd thought of epics, of heroes brave,
who'd left their safe and painful lives behind, and gone to
seek a greater quest, leaving at their souls behest, else death
and languor were soon to follow, and the wasted sorrow of
an empty soul. Walking. Alone. Wind like the gentle heartbreaking
breath of solitude and silence forced sighs gently through his
windswept hair, and so dries his skin, in anticipation of the
final sleep, to which all things must go, their time or no, on
this plane of infinite mortality, life and death locked in endless
cycle, revolving again and again. Life and death, Summer and Spring,
Fall and Winter.

Night had fallen. The legion of infinite stars sparkled in the empty night,
and laughed at him, distantly, far away spectators of petty life, they who
observe only, older than the gods whom man has created. It was the time of
Autumn, and so the trees fall backwards down into slumber, deathlike in their
tranquility, while their leaves fall one by one, swept by the wind and smoothing
rain, to scatter about the sleeping world, and crunch as their fragile veins, bones
of the one, of the all, unique and yet not, are sent into the wind, dust in the current,
as the man walks over the cold face of the dying world, the wonders of spent life
alone heralding the earths rebirth, that flurry of life and light and power. But
then, on that place, in that time under the stars, all was still.

Illuminated by the fragile moonlight, deceptive in its enchanting glow, the man,
who had walked the world, saw towering in the distance, black as the void behind
the night, the towering spires of an empty house, abandoned long, left by its unfaithul
masters to rot under the care of the rain and the sun and the ever blowing wind.
The man stumbled across an empty field, littered with jagged chunks of fallen stone,
the shattered bones of that empty place. The man built a fire from the fallen timber littered
there, and so drove back the night. For awhile. For when he closed his eyes to sleep, and laid him down his weary head, so returned the dark and fearful night, and left his mind painted red with blood, black with rage, grey with sorrow. Snow was coming. The man closed his eyes, and waited. Perhaps the shrieking wind would topple that ancient house, straining its
rusted nails, stretching its boards far past all endurance, and the house would fall. The world would fall, and send him screaming into the darkness from whence his nightmares came, to fall there, and become twisted in the darkness, until at last he too would become
one with the darkness, and rise to torment other souls, to guide them down to the darkness,
for forever and for eternity.

The sun rose high, and in that grey and cloudy sky, worked to lift the dying melancholy
from the world, a little. The man woke and, startled, he heard the songs of birds as they
too, rose with the early dawn, and sang their morning hymns to the rising sun. The man
walked out of that charred and ruined place as if in a dream, and so came to stand in the middle of that field littered with the broken stones of that place. Looking, he saw the dew glittering in the rosy light of dawn on the bare limbs of the naked trees, stark in their unclothed beauty. He beheld the yellowed grass, changing from their bone like hue, to a soft and golden color, as to wheat waving in the summer fields, in the bygone days of life and youth. He felt, light, as to the seeds of the dandelions floating on the breeze in the sweet months of spring, light as if he were the light, and so thinking he looked down and perceived
the golden grass, and closed his eyes. And yet! Glory of light, of heaven, of all glorys, he saw the grass, saw it brighten to shining brilliance as the world took on its true shape to him, he, blessed with the power of sight and light and peace at last, respite and tranquility from the seething dark. But no. He was rising, falling up, up into the empty nothingness of the blue and hollow sky. He tried to will himself down, tried to fall there, but he was nothing, a shadow made of light, and the light was taking him, taking him, merging with him, transforming him into the light worshipped and revered by all those who lived in peace and feared the darkness. And yet he was afraid. And as he passed into the light to suffuse the earth with his young and glowing light, his last thought before the end, was that it wasn't so bad, not really, at the end of things, at the end of him, to illuminate the world in light and nothingness.
It wasn't so bad he thought, as he passed, to be a star.

The rage that's in me is hard to describe.
Welling up, it roars inside, and whispers
softly in my ear, " to think's a common
innocent deed, the act of cowards, of fools
Of folly, to act's a different sort of thing,
a major step, a greater pact, 'tween you
and the devil down below. Act I say, and
take the prize, **** for glory, **** for greed,
take you what is rightfully yours, and
claim her hand forevermore."