Songbirds in Eulogy

After a while life becomes a routine that we follow without realizing it. Even after we have realized it is a routine, we can never shake it. We may change the way we do things for a while but eventually our existence finds its own equilibrium, it's own level space. I wonder if perhaps I am in one now, or whether I have changed something just a tiny amount.

If I think of my life as a physical shape, it is flat. It is dry there, and in the distance I can see the faint shadow of mountains and foothills. I am certain that they exist, but I am afraid to extend my hand out past my body, for fear that I will hit a piece of paper. I live in that flat space where there is not even a grain of sand...fear keeps me from searching for one beyond what I can see. The sun rises and sets with variable times - it never seems to come up when I expect it to, and it sets when I am still cursing the sweat that stains my collars grey. My sweat stains grey and never brown. Brown is the color of the earth and perhaps a person has to feel connected to the earth to have that color. These days I look up and I know that the stars are lumped together into groups that make mathematical sense, that fall neatly into columns on worksheets. I have become a routine, a program that runs in futility. The air is dry and when I breathe in at night I know that I am tasting faint laughter that falls behind those mountains like a fugue of raindrops.

I have a textbook in front of me but nothing is coercing me to read it. Knowledge does not seem worth the effort to gain it. By the time a person learns something it is already meaningless - it has become less than nothing because you replaced something you knew with it. You replaced something you knew, that you knew! Truth is peeled away like the skin of an apple, and our innocence is held by the ridge of our father's thumb, where the blade rests and scrapes it away in spirals. After everything there is nothing but an empty striated shell and that is what we are now. That is what is left, that is what remains and I am certain that it is what we are now. A wind blows and I stretch like an accordion to sing with it - how sad that humanity has come to this, that we are only reactions to an impulse...

In the winter, snow will fall and cover everything. It will be like a Greek rite of mysteries, where phallic cults would sacrifice the King-twin, the tanist, and in that way preserve his innocence and his manhood. When the snow melts a wave of birds wil blanket those once empty spaces with song and we might even notice the butterflies returning, if we ever lift our faces away from the screens of computers. The earth will be renewed and it is a terrible thing that we will not. There is no spring for us...there is only this soft winter, this bleached existence, this wavering plane where sunlight dully shivers.

-Rich

you weren't looking for an answer so much as a song