I
Dawn
A day awaits
Hopeful hours stretch before me
Hours of nothing
It’s noon
Morning has passed in a pool of eyegunk and crushing lethargy
Four o’clock
Five o’clock
The day slips into night
A day of nothing
But a day of pleasure

So does life pass
Slipping out like the tide
Like the tide

A flurry of lights around an empty shell
Before cold, soothing death

I refuse to accept there’s nothing more.
Nothing greater.

Greater than the endless shuffling of work and physical pleasure
On the unstoppable train to death

All that is physical is ultimately meaningless and vain
It flows away with the tide of Death

It may be enjoyed
But all that is good lies Beyond

It must
For if the mundane is the true Good
How hopeless is life.




II
Anyone who has been on a mountaintop
And seen the vast expanse of the heavens

Or seen the sun bursting through the clouds
On the dusky-red river

The crackling of the sky tearing itself apart
Above the roaring lake of the wilderness

The icy moon–
Watching us in terrifying solitude

The setting of the sun
As the world dissolves in milky-red light

Or crystal water descending through gardens of green
In the midst of the sun-streaked desert

The shore of the vast sea

Knows
Knows the depth beyond perception
Knows


III
Lake of the wild
Vast depths never sliced by a canoe

Sun-washed rocks
Sitting in swiftly-lapping waves
Amid miles and miles of open, empty water

Leviathans of the deep
Never seen by the sun
Moving
Moving in the sunless waters

Loons calling across the dark–
Calling, calling
With no-one to hear

Alone
Beyond the reach of the machinery of man
Hauntingly, terrifyingly alone