A Man

There's a man standing at the summit of an endless mountain atop an infinite plane and there's so much death in his shoulders and the slow bend of his body that he could have been the shadow or the sunset. He wasn't anything special and he never had been, though once upon a time when he'd been a different man in a different life in a different existence he'd thought he perhaps might be. There's a cold wind etching a burning ice into his skin and the scattering of invisible frost painted a picture of all that would never be. It didn't matter, of course. It never did. Because all that would never be was all he could ever have been.

God spoke to him in the hysterical winds of life spread out across the land and it spoke of purpose tucked away in the folds of life and death that were everything and had always been nothing at all. This God told him of not just 'a' purpose, but 'his', and had he heard or listened or known, perhaps it would've meant something more than the howl of all he couldn't see. Perhaps, but probably not. Because what is the purpose of the mountain or the plane if the path is paved and dictated? What glory holds the endless life?

The man stands still and ice carves deeper into his muscle and through that mortal bone. More than anything, he wanted to know the feeling of going home and being beyond the emptiness of everything. He wanted to feel the God's whisper whistle through his ear and echo in his head like a trumpet held by golden angels beyond his ephemeral eyes. And yet there was wind, that endless chill, and the world scattered fast and far and its meaning fell like human dust into the crevices that spanned the everything and the in between. 

The man heard no whisper if there was one to hear. The man felt no purpose. He froze fast into the face of ice and stone and perhaps he would become coal. Perhaps in a millennia he'd hold a diamond's shine. But that wasn't purpose, it wasn't anything at all, it was just the end and the pressure of the eternally shifting dirt. There was no belonging and there was no home, there was only the world that had never been his and the flat earth end that had never once slowed.

There's a man standing at the summit of an endless mountain atop an infinite plane and he's made of a mirror sheen ice. 

There's nothing in that mirror and it looks so much like me.