A new Torah scribbled out on dingy bathroom stalls;
cryptic quatrains dripping from the fingers of a man
wearing tattered clothes and a moth eaten hat.
Hunched and gray, his wrinkled face as dirty and bleak as his canvas,
his glazed eyes unaffected by the urgency in what his hands produce.

Inspiration comes to him in flashes:
alone on a mountain. Pristine, fertile fields stretch out below.
A citadel stands between the mountain and the fields.
Beyond, the low, pink sun reflects upon
an ancient river as it cuts a snaking scar--
an unheeded warning that nothing is immutable,
given enough time, even the Earth itself can be eroded.
Inevitably, ambition will intertwine with selective memory,
bound up tightly until destiny is indistinguishable from desire.

No man should enter his New Canaan;
no man should live to see dreams proved futile and unattainable.
Unshakable, he will conscript an army, build a trebuchet and,
wrapped in a blanket of righteous certainty,
wage a holy war for hearts and minds of peasants--
a fight to near extinction under the unquestionable banner of faith.

With determination he will conquer all he can survey:
the poisoned fields and the burned out, haunted homes,
but the memory of the sunset from his mountain camp will linger.
The untapped possibilities in that first, commanding glimpse of the valley
are infinitely more satisfying than what reality would ever allow.

The world is hollow, nothing but a paper-mache prop in some half-rate play,
it crumbles to dust under the slightest unbiased scrutiny.
The sun is an accusatory spot-light
pointing fingers at falsehoods and setting the stage ablaze.
The gray man can only smile and contemplate the callousness it takes
to watch disaffected as, like a Polaroid left to weather,
the colors and meaning fade away.

The bathroom is empty; the old man has gone.
The words remain as a beautiful beacon of clarity, none cheapened
by the limericks and the solicitations with which they share space.
An eternal testament to the crusader now lost
in the purposelessness between worlds and between missions.
For him there will never again be a magnetic north,
never a deus ex machina to turn his compass needle towards redemption
and the glorious kingdom that only existed in his mind.

10/04/2008

Posted on 10/05/2008
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