Rhythm, Rhyme, and Reason

The night filled the moment as I pondered when and how was I going to sleep.

The way they moved inside me, penetrating the intestines of my discontent, breached the wall that I myself had built. I am no one, this is no one, and, by the time this is finished, none of you will be there anymore. Just me and this.

To think, to wonder, thing of ponder. Words used for melodramatic obsolete purposes. I can't remember a time when doing this brought pleasure. And I can't remember why I even began to do this. Exercise maybe. To show off possibly. Or maybe just to confirm that I can still do it. Unorganized, thoughtless, without technique... like always.

This writing, like my life, was supposed to be a poem, but it grew into prose. And I miss it so; the connection between rhythm, rhyme, and reason. A true challenge, even more so for the fact that it shouldn't feel like one. If so, the lines suffer from unwarranted tension; although, sometimes they feed from it. Of the ones I've pulled off, some certainly did, but I didn't begrudge. They were my children: one of the few things in my past life that were truly genuine. Honesty swept from my fingers, while I struggled to not think, to not feel, to just write. Like now.

I've tried to revive it, but it is of no use. Poetry in verse is a melancholic blind spot, easily drawn into a corny soap opera, in which mediocrity oozes, sucking the life out of the paper. It ends up lacking character, a definition... it ends up lacking balls:

Dirty sweat and muscles tightening.
I tear the skin off her.
The meat, the sour, the scream,
all steer my strength to sunder.

But it's useless, as those four lines equate a lifetime of exasperation with my own self. Those lines were tiresome, heartening, and just plain vicious, in both message and technique. They do no favor in disguising the writer's inner struggle between wanting to be a good poet and wanting to be an honest writer. It may have balls, but the sweetness underneath was kept aside, forced into submission, all for the sake of saving an ego-driven face:

The weak pull from you,
steal your tears,
but you keep on,
drowning in your own sweat.
Blast through the traps with no fear,
Just don't forget,
those lines hooked and set
were pulled by your own self, dear.
But, no worries, no shroud.
Step in, forget the cloud.
Quivering in expectation,
I await your blunder.
A slip, a fall, a stumbler.
The oh sweet sound
of another one tripping in.
Go on, another round,
why maybe, who knows?
Lucky you might go again.

It's near, but not for long, like it's saying goodbye, but I don't want to wave back. It can hold so much meaning, the simplicity in its own can be enough to explain whole essays, yet I've never learned how to grasp it adequately. Like a magic sword with no owner, a threefold stool that doesn't seem to hold any weight, or a symbol that only God understands: it's powerful but untamable. Character, beauty, and meaning; rhythm, rhyme, and reason...

My fingertips are growing numb
as the sentiment of a known past is yonder.
Canned in the outer wrapping
it peels off, steadily,
to a brisk powder.
I wait, hastily, asleep
in a dream that seems no different in splendor.
Stopped, I awake absent of it,
but feeling just the same.
It has flown away from me,
as if it were never mine.
My fingertips feel warm,
they dance now to a different time.
Different style,
but same thoughts,
same grunts.
It slips, "let go."
Today's different,
"I'm through.
You don't need me anymore,
you haven't since long ago."

A memory of solitude, of warmth in time of cold, teachings of how to hold on while letting go. Irony, it seems, it's immune to style, and letting go seems as appropriate as ever. The cloud is still there, and, even though I'm left with only one tool to walk through it, it is the one I forged. With it, I'll ride through the myst that is called life, and breath it through the new lungs I've been using all along.

Verse, I hardly knew ye, and I hardly think that will be a problem.