I.

Away crept the daylight….

Thankfully it took all the reality

With it.

The sunlight exhausts me perpetually.

At night, I escape the sun’s plantation,

Let Aeacus’ wisdom judge my

Mind, scatter the sanity he finds—

Though not much, enough to damn me

Should it stay inside….

II.

My fragments ride the night,

Endlessly….never a better time to escape

Than today—many days too late,

But never—not ever—too early to be gone….

Though the night makes only as much

Sense as the day, at least it does not pretend

To be rational….Selene’s irrational truth

Means nothing, but Apollo’s

Reason burns my exposéd skin.

III.

Guilty, I cling to hopeless darkness.

I can’t go back to burning….

Exposed to accounted reason—

Running from shadows of daylight,

Breathless as each fades away….

Shattered words keep me chained

Through the night, abandon my fragments

In the vast disconnect, as meaningless

Apart as they were together—no longer

A lie, but a shadowed blot

On the black canvas—nothing.

IV.

In the light I could not see or feel,

I could not hear the meaning

Nor discern the ways that truth took—

At least in the darkness I expect blindness,

And with blindness, senselessness.

I have no faith in the light, it has deceived me,

I am lost to its ways, yet….in the dark,

Nothingness is become salvation—

Shuddering, the black soaks me up.

V.

A candle in the darkness

Attracts me closer….and closer….

One candle on a table, with a matchbook,

And candles all along the walls...

Gently burning the midnight wick,

Shadows grow to substance.

I watch the candle wax melt in darkness.

As the candle wanes,

Encouraged, a match in my hand….

Slowly I make my way ‘round the black room

Lighting all the candles.

VI.

Candlelight flickers o’er the burnt-out

Matchbook, ashes falling on the hard-wood floors,

My own embers burned out but glowing again,

Lit all along the room….

Gently bathed in candlelight, whispers come to me—

Whispers from the silence

Speak of love and hope, solidity beneath the nothingness,

And slowly, even as the candle wax melted around,

I begin to understand how light gives substance to shadow—

Dispelling the darkness without sunburns—

And by the time all the candles melt away

I am ready, again, to face the day.

VII.

Red-raging sunrise on the horizon, I test myself

With the coming of the light—

Silhouetted upon the dark, rocky hill,

I steel myself against abandoning the morning,

Though blinded by the sun’s radiance

Adorning the heavens in its sacred halo….

My fear remains, bubbling and burning for a while,

Then—a remarkable calm seizes me,

Hope’s walls sprout from exposed nothingness,

As Faith casts out self-appointed lies.