look inside a poet's soul

I stand at the edge of a great abyss.

The wind is fiercely cold at my back, pressing ever so subtly for me to

leap

but the runner of the cliffs of the human heart and soul is no fool.

Or, perhaps, just an unusual one.

I have been asked by the shadows to defend. This is not the first time I have been called upon to defend an article of my faith, nor the darkest. I have, in past times, won my case for God, and lost it for truth, only to win it later. I have spoken for integrity and for temperance, and even self-denial, for sacrifice, for charity.

And now, for love.

To speak with clarity, one must step to the lip of the world and look down upon the stars, an infinite voyage you would never fall to, as there are forces that would grind you to dust before you ever laid eyes on a single world beyond this sphere.

It is an humbling moment. Humbling and cold. The preamble asked of happiness.

Am I happy? I defended the argument of yes, the other day, to a friend, stating that happiness is not a binary station, but a scale, a range of answers. I am, for the most part happy.

But, I am not.

I feel the crust of my exile, every day, like a bone spur in the heel of a runner, digging in ever time I

step

forward to think and feel and seek and believe.

Jade says I am like Sisyphus, happy in my purpose. She is right, in part, being an archetype is rewarding, to a point.

To a point, but not to the point.

So let us barter for life, for love, for faith, for dreams.

What would I have that I do not have? I can't answer that. I know the answer, but it would open a gash in my last defenses, rendering me a simple target in a world of moving images. A big and bright red dot, as big as the sky.

I have always been a machine, complex and chaotic and mad and elegant in design, perhaps, but a machine. A perpetual emotion machine, requiring a fuel to drive me, able to, at least for a season, make love out of nothing. But I am exposed as hollow when the veil is pulled aside and my creative bride proves to be wax or wood or even illusion.

I am the Amomancer, a dancer of words. A weaver of romances. One who kisses jasmine incense and paints runes of fire and sweat in heated strokes of an arcane brush, dipped in hunger and belief.

I do not know where I left the boy I was was, the man I became. Somewhere down the road, I was not looking when the transfiguration overtook me and I had overlooked the price, even though I had warned and warmed myself on the precognitive mythology of the coming change.

What are the shadows? Facets of the mind, of the soul, of the heart. Art comes from conflict, and I have spun tapestries immortal with the aid of these jesters of pain. One shadow seeks stagnation, mediocrity. The other seeks to feed with no concern for those who could be harmed. The former seeks only to fit in, to be one of the herd. The latter wants to feed on the herd.

I can't be either. I tried the first suit of flesh on for a time, willing myself dead to live amongst the orchids while I dreamt of roses. The pain of shedding that skin drove me to the other, and I lost my moral compass. While not as evil as I could have become, I allowed myself to take a path of rationale. Excusing my sins of, mostly, omission with an omniscient eye that recorded all for my own mockery. I watch bits and pieces of it, every day, with a heavy heart.

I have a friend who the other day said that if his wife died, he'd kill himself. I told him I envied him. I shocked myself with that revelation. I have been so often disappointed by conditional and feeble loves in my life that to love someone so much again, that I could not survive their passage from this sphere, oh that would be a delight.

"Give me this or I won't love you anymore, help me do this or I don't love you."

What kind of graceless, spineless, soulless species are we the children of? We are and need to be better than that.

I defend love as...an echo.

The fact that you hear an echo does not mean it is not a real sound, shaped by the forces that reflected it form its original source. Love is a reflection of our world, both the seen and the unseen. I have loved those who did not love in return because that is a part of love, just as God loves even those who denies God's very existence. I still have the passion, the hunger, the heart, the mind, the craft, the soul, the heat, the light, the warmth, the strength to love. I will love with my words, my thoughts, my heart, my hands, my plans, my actions, my flesh. The wind fades.

So what of me, now? This world is not a lucid dream, but I am a lucid dreamer. I have before taken flight to end a fall in a dream.

I choose to take point and throw myself from the precipice. Because I choose love and thus embrace sorrow, pain, joy, lust, sacrifice and the occasional mockery. I'll eat onions, even thought I do not like them, if they are in the way of a steak. I'll take some sadness if it means I still get love, even if it is just I get to give love. There will be shadows and scrapes and tears and kisses and broken hearts and broken promises and broken minds and burnt words. But love is, in and of itself, immutable. Ask John Lennon. Ask Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ask Jesus. (There's three people rarely caught on the same street corner.)

I will continue to love and to seek love, because,

from the beginning and in the end,

that is my nature.

To love. And that is who I am.

The Amomancer.