Which is better

To feel nothing
But a halcyon calm
Like a fine summer morning,
Or to be ****** to and fro
By the ice, spray, and lightning
Of the tempest?

To stroll the meadow,
Or to climb the mountain?

I've gone through both
Yet the answer still eludes me
I remain as ignorant as I was
In the days of my youth

But what I do know
Is how my chest tightened
How my breath caught
When you sent me a message
(Your very first)
And how my lips impulsively purse
As I peek at yours
And at the speck of a mole
Resting right below

What I do know
Is how I couldn't keep my eyes
From straying towards your corner
(Still can't)
And how my hand trembled
Just as I squeezed your shoulder
Bidding you farewell

Or how I've worn out my iPod
Replaying Jay Chou's ballads
As I sang my heart out to my steering wheel
Numbly crawling through
The maddening, seething traffic

And how the breeze eats my cigarette
Down to its filter
As I stare up
Dumbfounded
Mapping out
Tracing your face among the stars

How my neurotransmitters **** me
Closer and closer to a heart attack
And how my soul weeps and bemoans
The yawning chasm betwixt us
While you sit there infuriatingly oblivious
Chattering away about Warcraft and barley tea

All these things are
The few of what I do know
The last of which
Is how I'll never have you.

Fleeing
Tail between my legs
From the ravishes
Of your lashes
I take refuge in the ramblings
Of madmen long dead
Seeking to tap the will to power
That I may refute
Your imposing master-slave morality
Compelling in its distracting hedonism
Beckoning in its languid ambiguity
Suffocating my
Dizzying, radical freedom

Oh, noumenal world
Take me now.

One look at you
And I abandon
My categorical imperative
Doomed to the fate
Of a being-in-itself
Powerless to recreate
And renew its essence
Too busy being caught up
In your scent
I see what you are
And scramble to
The conclusion of
What you ought to be
With me

For you are beyond
That which empirical validation
Can encapsulate
You are
My Prime Mover
And life without you
Is nasty, brutish, and short
And Rousseau was full of ****

I flee
Because inner language
The beetle in the box
Can never be shared
Not even with
The most symmetrical of soulmates
And what we may share
May not even be authentic
What we believe
May not even be true
Nor justified

Are you not satisfied
With the power you already wield
Over me?

Please
My geisha
Do not let your lips
Be the antithesis to my pen.

I hate you
For who
And what
You are not.

I can only speak
Through masks
My cowardice pulls me back
Into the inky darkness
Even my ******* desire for you
I must conceal
In the haze of bravado and apathy
And the clawing ache
Your gaze summons
I must suppress
With the very essence of my spirit

Forgive me
For what kind man
Would resort to such craven means
Just to bare his very soul?
Surely not one worthy of you.

The Lion's heritage
Compels me and curses me
To the bitter fate
Of wandering the halls
Of lonely perfection
Eternity upon eternity

A duplicitous nature
Earns curses
But I am grateful
For the gift of masks
Without which
Truth dies.

Do not find love
For it finds you
And find you it did
Like the first beams of dawn
Kissing the dew
On the slumbering meadow

And what was once
A verdant vale of calm
Is now a riotous explosion
Of cerulean and crimson
Caressed by the velveteen kisses
Of the eastern breeze

The languid shore
Now a maelstrom
Of spraying foam
A gale of berserk fury
Poseidon thundering
Confronting
The forbidding cliffs
Of time

O maiden
Sighing into
The lonely watches of the night
For whom are those tears shed?

Tarry not
For Helios comes
To take you in his embrace
And within the tongues of immolation
Is purifying salvation
That even
The Twelve Labors of Heracles
Are impotent to redeem

And you are no frail Icarus
Jesting and boastful
Impertinent in his youthful optimism
Who eludes and placates
The assault of the elements

Now take the plunge
O Athena
Laughing into the depths
Of the mercurial Aegean
For she who dares the fates and furies
Commands Olympus.