Don Mann: Focusing on my Craft

Wednesday, Jun. 08, 2005 - 1:00 a.m.

What it is to feel betrayed, solitude stolen by a broken promise, the ringing in my head isn't just the humming of instinct anymore, it's the single-note song of sorrow and the misguided cry of unheeded advice.

I'm forced back to the thoughts which smothered me once before, the decisions I've made once crushed me, the last thing slashed into my memories was the look in her eyes. I am the slave and you are the garden I till, our circumstances the distant sun which beats and burns upon my flesh. Each tick upon the clock is a lash upon my weathered hide, and the moments when I dwell upon you are drops of soothing rain.

The battle's all in my head, the answers to all my questions are just more and more questions, the truth nothing but a metaphor which I can't interpret. Sulking, slowing, dragging behind me the weight of a collection of tear-filled eyes that stare down like stars flooding the valley where we have wandered before. Clouds like foggy parents stare down from the hillsides peering out from among the trees to nod their heads, or twist their shoulders sympathetically.

I'm not myself, I'm not who you want me to be, I'm not what I've been trying to be all along. All that remains now is a collection of memories propelling an inert body skimming across the surface of the deepest, coldest sea; mocked by the laughter in its wake.

I'm underwater, watching the surface a hundred feet above me and sinking faster, I'm not holding my breath anymore; lucid and calm my heartbeat pulses with the waves, my soul leaves with the ebbing tide as I draw in a cold, heavy lungful.

I'm rising up now, eyes wide open and strings of crimson tears fluttering before them, dancing in the moonlit abyss. Thrown back my arms outstretched and fingers probing for warmth, wrinkled tips flickering with my body's gently twisting halo.

At last, the morning light reveals the truth and the stream remains, falling leaves finding me cold and worn from countless murky hours, the rivulet's current bearing the pallbearer's burden and carrying me down to a quiet pool to soak up the morning's rays. The beasts of the forest carry a woeful weight upon their hearts but do not bow their heads to my scarlet basin as the men would, instead distancing themselves from the spectacle.

The game is just beginning, the spring's storms and singing breeze are but a fading sense of reminiscence, and the scent of bleeding blades in the field is overwhelming, the buzz of brooding insects tears a casual sigh in every meadow that even the deaf man can feel tingling in his head. The cracks in the boards on his front porch peeling apart casting splinters in his leathered feet, but none will ever find his blood or his heart like the scene that awaits him beside the innocent pool where his childhood incubated to manhood and mine did not, and could not.

Delve Into The Past - Onward Into The Future