Loneliness

It is an ill wind that rest upon my shoulders on this day Much of what I feel I can not describe and even though this bothers me, I do not wish to find a way to make it all coherent. I have been lost in the world of the pen where all contact with the real world is severed like the baby cut from its mother’s womb. I have felt tenderness in the absence of friends yet a mystic presence cradles me in its embrace, gently whispering that I am not alone. It tells me that I must relish in this pearl of silence and let nothing break the gift of loneness. 

 Do you hear that sound or is it merely the echo of my paranoia? I hear a sound so loud and unclear and I want, for a moment, to let myself dwell in its intensity. But I know that I must not, for a voice warned me that I was not to let anyone in. So I pound my head against the harshness of the cold wall and hope to God that tears my dark flesh and makes my soul bleed. This is a pleasure that can only be enjoyed by the few who know what it is like to find comfort in pain.

I sigh with the realization that this is a world with very little compassion. A world based on a fear so intense it has blinded us from the truth, that we are ONE. We are ALL wanting. Yet we look at the successful and scorn the weak, we love the children but hate the adults. Were we not ALL weak once? Were we not ALL children once? Did we not ALL play in the dirt and scrape our knees? When, where and how did we loose our youthful innocence? 

I sigh once more with the fear that if I do not show some semblance of compassion for the bum at the corner, St. Paul will slam heavens gates at my face. And in that thought, I find the answer to a question I never asked. Religion, that is my culprit. The wandering stain that teaches us to fear who we are by putting our given power outside of ourselves. This fear that follows us everyday of our lives, regulating us like prisoners in an Island that we cannot leave, the Island of the self. Religion, Karl Marx says, is the opiate of the masses. I believe that not once in his wildest dreams did Mr. Marx think that his words of liberty would result in the world’s longest dramatic pause.