Fever

It was pain he wanted to feel. Or Passion. Epiphany. Dire thirst for carnal bliss, brilliant compassion, or commensurate rage! Willing, wanting, Hammer bruises, Public pubics, Seen stripped, Being naked, Vulnerable, True, by Sun fire light, or by ice cuts under dark skies. To be clay formed unformed reformed never quite formed, dried out and re-wetted. To begin again, to tire of mindless mindfulness, to redact the absurd and listen for bird song, spring leaves growing, voices in the wet escapees from snow and ice. Spirit bounced above voices of ridicule, skating over ignorant chatter and accusations. Free! From the need to be free. Who gave him this chance? He wants the fever, prayed it would build, and, under the last strain, to break, to spill, capturing tears, and legion beginnings.

Strained he, with the ordinary anxieties, of food packed between teeth, of a motor that won't start, of a drop of pain in every step, of humiliated success and exalted failure, of loving and loathing and telling the difference. Strained he, with redawning memories and convictions, preconceptions and neuronal engravings, dragged across the mind, as if important. Strained he, his longing desire to raze and rout the ordinary, the anxieties and the hope for hope. Strained he, to build the fever, hoping it would breach the well built inhibitions, break the bonds of restive doubt, wash out the dirt of debt and loneliness. Straining he wants, not to please, but to play, his life.

A child it was who looked into the sky and saw vast space and stars dispersed in un-patterns, burning privately in full view, owing to the dust and gas of which every other body has been made, its own existence.

An old man it will be, denuded of pitch and rumble, of tearing across life, by small frictions and cuts, by the bruises of lost dreams, slowing him to a walk, a crawl, a collapse. At long last the fever is broke, no more to strain: what ends a life? The heart stop? Hair ceasing to grow? The final kiss? The orgasm after which none is? The gentle setting of eye lids down over blank eyes? The last thought? The final gossamer memory of desire? He leaves, not knowing, not feeling, not giving, not receiving, any more, the rites of passage. He passes, not to, only from.

While they leave, pondering “Where did he go?”. Feeling sadness, anger, loss, wonder, still, in their lives, giving, receiving, from and to. “He is gone,” they will say “What will we do?” And asking, they do. They love, loath, make babies, pick fruit, compete for standing, make art, write books, observe history, list and die, too.

And were they together, after life, watching, perhaps over time they would not recognize their kind in the descents of them, and then the Earth would die, too, and their attentive disembodied selves would have no more an anchor. To what would they attach? Remnant heat and gas and dust? Those untold billions of other disembodied selves? In some roiling boil of cosmic glowing super-nature?

But then, really, simply, they just are not. Their home only ever breathed them. They came, in, went, out, birthed blinked history unnoticed in the vastness of time.

Seeking hoping driving planning working making love, leaving it all behind – what did he want? What had he wanted? He didn't know. HE DIDN'T KNOW. He had spent his life asking, because HE DIDN'T KNOW.