Walking
in the swarthy
and swarmy
woods and wilds
of my backyard,
there were no stars
and there was no light.
At midnight there would be no
prince for the night;
no other could be
quite as dark as the pitch
the woods
the wilds
of my
mind,
my heart,
my very soul and
every cord of my existence.
They had frayed on the edges,
had torn through the hedges
of layers and layers to
insulate me from
the deep, unsettling
cold.
The chill bit at me,
nipped and played with my fingers,
its mouth an icy and most frozen maw.

This was simply no time for a breakdown.

Every thought can be construed logically,
mentally,
without heart and without
soul;
your feelings can be felt from
one central command center,
can be ordered and prompted like
the code on a screen.
You are a screen,
a vast computer
computing away love and lust and
hate
and
self loathing
to fill up the time,
the empty spaces
between the bursts of information
radiating from your
core.
The human brain is a machine,
like most things truly are.
It runs on logic and illusions and delusions
of the heart.
For, you see,
it is the heart that is the center
the heart that is the core
the heart that powers that great and billowing factory
of thoughts and dreams and desires
of every man we ever loved
and every person we admired--
for the heart is seated in the head
upon a gray matter throne,
adorned with
electrical currents and
neural connections and
a visage that never flatters
its surroundings.
This industrial labyrinth,
this monumental mess of
perception and reality
traps you while awake and
bind you while you dream.
From within that maze of
mental pipes and wires and beams
the heart shall do its coldest calculations,
shall punch in the numbers and
spit out the
degrees of feeling.

It is hard to escape, sometimes;

though, lately I have preferred
the gentle simplicity of nature,
its cool and calm suggestions,
its easy-to-take truths.
It is so much easier to dwell among
the pines, the oaks, the locus and the ash,
to burn a pile of logs and to
smear one's face with the ash.
For the machinations of the mind,
of matter and of all material
perception
are far more wicked,
more complex,
more frightening than anything in nature.
I like it better to feel the nibbles of soon-winter,
the stinging of the flesh,
the goose-prickling of
my very breath
as it billows out into the stars,
out into the vast sky,
the vaster heavens,
the vastest cosmos
and beyond
into the very heart
of the Universe
matter
life
everything
my breath shall rise and float
and mingle with the gods upon
the waves and currents of Everything,
that Most Natural Machine.