Poetry: #59 Empty (The Search For 7)
And my thoughts after revisiting the words
Empty
Every step together is a step towards disaster, the mansion on the horizon was not built to last forever, and standing here in such a dismal place bleeds me dry like the rye left outside in the afternoon sun. The rain has not come, not for years and I stand here on the ledge of this cliff looking down at the dried decades of family farms frantically trying to survive the storm. Adversity, a beast unlike any other, tamed by no man or woman, no human, no one; lurks beneath every step and every circumstance that we know. There is no safety when we cannot face our fears for all Adversity has to do is rear its ugly head. One after another they all drop dead damning each other for their woes never realizing their true foe. I am left, alone, in a desolate land that so many knew, that I alone now own. No god complex or narcissism got me to this place, just as no lies or deceit or fabrications brought me here. I am not seeing the end result of some mad dream; I am seeing the world as it is to me. Empty. Like the eyes of the bodies staring back at me. No depth. No life. No reason. No purpose. Our adversaries have one, except the one before me. The behemoth that I face. The nectar of the gods above and the blood of the demons below run dry and shudder at the shadow of the beast, the Adversary. The one who takes. The only living creature, unliving. I stand just paces away and my breath is starting to falter. I feel the anxiety racing at the impending struggle. My mind blank, I know what I must do yet wonder if I am meant to. Empty, like the eyes of the bodies in the fields below me, like the strangling breaths from my lips as I sweat staring at the Adversary. With no purpose to place I wake from my dreams screaming. The world whose depth is growing shallow, like the reason and purpose we looked to, like the intellect and genius that is our legacy. Empty.
What are your thoughts on this poem?
My Thoughts & Takeaway
Remember the Collector Collection and the beast that can trap us from doing what we want to do? It is named here as the “Adversary”. The thing that takes and takes and takes… A collector of hopes and dreams that are demolished as it consumes them without hesitation. That which we must fight against to persevere and achieve our aims in life. This is one of those poems that hurts to read out loud. It was not a god-complex or narcissism that wrote this poem, nothing but my personal nihilism. Perhaps nihilism can lie to the one consumed by it, perhaps everything I saw in the world was a fabrication by the beast, the Adversary, and the world wasn’t actually as empty as I saw it.
There is a callback to that high school friend here that said the look in my eyes had faded, and I felt it in the moments I spent writing this. I found nothing by shallowness in the world and that was all I was giving out in this time, the time with drinking pals that wasted time more than it gained me wisdom. There is another callback that is the reason I sat and wrote about the bird outside my window, which is something I will discuss towards the end of the year in Used, the only time I felt anything like a panic attack or anxiety welling up to the point of no return…
I had night terrors as a young child, and nightmares throughout much of my childhood. Those come back to me in emotional times if I refuse to write or think about what is on my mind. That is one of the major reasons I gravitated towards writing in the first place. It can be a therapy, and has been for me. There is a balance that must be had, because too much writing can cause more damage than good, sending things out of balance. There must be equal measures of depth and restraint when writing, at least for me.
All that said, there is a curious line that I wish to discuss. “The world whose depth is growing shallow, like the reason and purpose we looked to, like the intellect and genius that is our legacy.” For all our new inventions and all the things we have in our Information Age, we stand on the shoulders of giants. There are few visionaries, thinkers, inventors, or similar that people along those lines that exist today and are not caught up in the shallowness of the world. Too much of our time is spent in decadence today, and the Romans are a good parallel to draw upon as to why a society that has everything and more can collapse. How can we live today so that we do not fall victim to this decadence? And, what I might say is the more important question, how can we live so that the world that has access to seemingly limitless resources does not feel or become empty?
I hear another poem is coming every Saturday!