When Reason Is No Longer Enough

Well, Lou, you say you’re Jesus son, rushing on your run … your grubby drug-fuelled run … such a young man’s game, eh … but Jesus? Not Fred or Ted, or even Lou … you reach so high only so you can fall so low … rushing on your run of hatred so visceral yet so elegant …

So angry and confused with everybody and nobody, but it’s really about you …

Really about me…

Here, now, in my dwindling autumn tears, I want to rise again and follow that sacred, flickering light … chase it discretely down the angled corridors of the hallway, out into the fabled street … to shift and sift … to meet and cheat on rhyme and timescale … and follow, follow that tricky wisp … out among the hapless souls and a thousand unfermented visions … unrelenting pointless questions …

In and out of people and stations … down into the darkness sometimes, sombre and imperious … shadows of density and intrigue … ooze down between the cracks, the moss between the flagstones, a lowly weed as strong as any flower … stronger … growing, or not, but not for want of trying … reaching up to sun and the surface, and sinking satisfied into acceptance  … glad of their nourishment and their evanescence …

Yes, yes … you can stop at any time, any time … life is twisted and unkind … only it’s not … it’s just …  tell that to the scurrying pointless beetle or the industrious ant … why is he even red since he doesn’t know it … he doesn’t look for reason or ideas, or questions and refinements … can he even say he wants or why … can he say … anything … nothing means anything … meaning is a distraction we invent to do nothing, to stop being what we can … reach, reach for the sun, and the light …

Hah … you’re at it again, stopping to shape and twist your hindering vision, and now you know your eyes are bleary and your old body reappears to torment you … no, no … go on, get up, rinse these rancid rattling thoughts, these whinging and distracting nothings … and follow it again, the light that is always there, beyond you, constant and fleeting but beating, beating … constant … where …

Go on, go on your choice is remade … off once more, taking to the secret pathway … effortlessly working out its daft trigonometry … it takes you, not the other way … let your distracting body fall away and run, run, run, don’t rush …

You don’t need to feel the raindrops slick your cheekbones, or drip into your seeing vivid eyes … only you do … those same eyes no longer bleary, but awake and seeing …  you don’t have to linger in any doorway … or hide on any breeze … like Jesus’s son …

Remember, there’s a heart inside this twisted head …