The Story's End
This is just a story and
I swear it isn’t true
Because what am I but a lying man
Between the old things
And the new
Possessions that flood the floodgates
And spill out into the seas
Where the currents still go bump in the night
But they’re dreams I cannot see.
They spark like dying christmas lights
And they flare like shipwrecked men
On the beaches of the life you chose
To live among the lions
But they have been domesticated
And they’re drowning in the waste
Of everything you thought you were
The painter with no paintbrush and
A model’s shattered face.
For what are we but poachers of elephants
And the killers of all sacred things.
We are those who are lost on the search for a path
For the sake of the sirens we sing
And we weigh anchor in towns that mean nothing
The nothing that hides in the soul
In those silent black spots that speak happiness thoughts
Until the calendars are canyon-built rows.
Yet still our captains count
Those dying dead stars
They’ll always point into the night
They swear that the sky can’t lie to them
And tell stories of when it went right.
They tell of the lovers they left on the shore even as waves crash overhead
And they tell us their stories
They tell us their lies
Of how they will see them again.
Because this route is just a tunnel
Down
The long dark hall without doors
And there’s a lone dead thing who walks
With me to the sound of a distant bell
And its face is the nothing that spreads
Like a cloud
Through the hells of all I can’t say
For the sake of the life that still couldn’t be
Until the Devil will cry on his life-charred rock
That it’s a soul even he cannot sell.
And so this memory will linger until
Long after the muscles have died
And the corpse of the dead thing living
Will laugh through where its empty eyes
Would once have shined bright with the everything,
The space between every last word
The home of the heartbroken sycophant
And the false coin the poor man has earned.
That counts for something though
Doesn’t it?
The sliver of life that was led
On the backs of a dream of the finite fad things
So full of the false promises that spread
Brand new life across the black screen
A static false flare of a pulse until
The world left us alone once again.
And even then that would’ve been fine
I’d swear it on my life
But that’s not where all those ships must sink
Among the chilling tide waters that separate out
The lovers from the hearts that beat weak.
For while they say they aren’t made for the harbors
They say they’re meant for the seas
The fell ocean floor is full of the parts
Of the men who’d all once believed
That their paths were always charted
No course could not be set
For the lives they’d find and the something so vast,
All that those lives might have meant.
But there was always a dock that sat empty
At the end of an infinite walk
Where lone shadows staggered forever until
The night and the darkness caught up.
And they watched the sun set forever alone
Against the golds, the reds, the silence misread,
And the lives they never could lead
For the sake of the nothing that still might’ve meant
That there was a point to the quiet
And the ending
And the sea.
Perhaps then their ship might have sailed
And even then it might’ve been built,
To bridge that empty space that stretched
Over cold water that never would spill
To fill the mouth of a drowning man waiting
For a calm to this wearying storm
Who wanted only an end to the thirst in his heart
That looked like the dying North Star.
Even so, all ships are built to sink
In time
And even then I guess so are we.
Perhaps that shouldn’t make me feel better but then
I guess if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be me.
So I walked out alone to the end of the pier
For the sake of the altar and that dead weight of fear
That hung rough like a towering noose
To be thrown round the bend of the sail in time
To soar with the gulls
And be one with the clouds
As a black flag with nothing to lose.
It would’ve been a fitting end to the endless
And my shadow would have flown with the sea.
But then, this is just a story
I promise
And I swear it isn’t me.