The Emptiness That Never Goes Away

There is no mystery

just the crushing blow of living

never interfering with life.

Arrogance pleads for justification

but remorse is often the gift.

We ask questions,

they are unsettling,

unanswerable.

There are no reasons, just observations,

a seagull, the smell of a white peach,

a begging dog waiting to be adopted.

There is only the concrete of the street, 

of the sidewalk

of the knock to the head

to what once could have been

now just spilled milk on a dirty floor.

Most of us are cowards, not fools. 

Yet we dance to the same intentions and doubts

and fall from pantomime heights 

only to bounce from insignificance to indifference.

Then there is that laughter.

That laughter that never leaves the head.

The rotting but never dying words that paralyze 

because the gentleness on the landscape

is violated with either expectation or regret.

There is that gloomy, ragged carnival

that travels the mind where amusements are not amusing.

They are perilous, broken or still.

Gamblers with a fear of value

with a fear of shadows

ignore invitations and despise appeals 

and the rejection from the mirror’s reflection is agonizing.

But what is worse is the truth it exposes.

The wind hisses when moving up a mournful stream.

The smell of adaptation never generates into translation,

and what is sought lies in a casket cascading over a waterfall.

Revel in absurdity, 

the reality that holds existence a thought above quicksand.

Once I whirled on saffron and evening primrose 

not believing that self-destruction is outwitted by distance.

How absurd that the deadliest of all serpents claws within us.

It thickens from the wealth of realism consumed from absent encounters.

The rendering becomes not a warning but a persistent signal 

from a lighthouse on trial for the emptiness that never goes away. 

Life denies its oppressiveness,

while living lies open to misfortune.

There are roads,

paths can never discover.

The relentless insistence to possess comfort,

and the noose attached that scars with hooks. 

When venturing blindly, 

any misshapen key to heartbreak becomes heartbreak itself.

The faucet drips, another birth, summing up nothing. 

Nothing, without boundaries.

Modeled with proper etiquette and a maze of identical circumstances.

You see there is no mystery,

Yet,

yet

a mask is worn to unveil the self 

seeking what is fortunate, never believing in the curse of wide-eyed sadness.

Then what is identity? 

A third-rate character in a dimly lit discussion of future tragedies.

Remember there are no mysteries.

Only thoughts.

Only thoughts on why pure imagination through a sieve 

produces

something as incomplete

as life.

Philip received his Master of Arts in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published six poetry books, with another forthcoming. Three novels and two plays. He has a column in the magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.