TATTOOED SOUL
I go to the high desert, to a place as barren as my spirit.
I need to be alone and yet I find others there with me.
I cannot see them. They pass around as whistles in the wind.
They find me a curiosity, a sad tumble weed within a sack of flesh.
They urge me to share my rambling pain. I don’t trust their interest
but there’s no way to hide my thoughts. I’m determined to ignore them.
I aim my steps for a far horizon and sink within the mirage of me.
Ripples of light blaze on the sand, burning away the dust devils
encircling dry bones, the very things in me never forgotten or denied.
A scorpion in the shadow of a cactus brandishes its tail hook, as if to say,
“And now I will show you the most excellent way.”
The orthodox radicalism of my agnostic dogma befalls parasitic processing.
I hear a suggestion, unsettling the spell -- thought breaks things apart,
emotions solidify them together. But what good is there liberating the light
in a place with nothing left to shine on?
If love exists it only proves that God is not bound by rationality.
Wisdom is not falling into despair over the truth of one’s fate.
A rock falls nearby and I accept that it’s not trying to get where it belongs.
In life, fullness is more than duration and yet the desert is timeless.
My soul is covered with tattoos, each tattoo a meaning I made an essential part of me.
And now there is no space left within me to tattoo. My soul is covered with them.
Drives and desires ink tattoos of meaning on our eager souls,
those craven canvasses of purpose. We collect them with ardent energy
then live with them with mixed feelings and a dread of rational satori.
I assume it is possible to be happy, even in a palace,
and yet the fate of all things is an absurdity.
The point in heaven existing at all is to convince us to accept death
even though everyone will die but not everyone has lived.
The despairing hole in being is sucking the salient light away,
but why after all does a need exist for a light beam in the empty space of me?
Wisdom is knowing what is and isn’t in my control but how do I discern between?
I fuse my meaning to the objects I project it on and become confused,
an inner conflict ignites. The things and people and experiences out there
must be mere shadows on the wall of intended consummation, for even when
they initially appear as meaning’s satisfaction attained, the achievement hollows out
in time with changes and a closer examination of what eventually occurs
when the outside element asserts itself through its own projected meaning.
The illusion of mutual dreams realized via a link to meaning never matches either goal.
Why is it so hard to accept? Things outside of me are not in my control
and tattooing meaning on my soul’s image of the outside objects of desire
will never make it so. I am told I cannot know The One.
I can only become The One. Likewise, should I say I cannot find my meaning,
I only become my meaning? If only I had a clear soul, a pristine canvass
free of my lived meaning, perhaps then I could reflect clarity in lieu of certainty,
maybe then I would put into action what my soul truly is and always was.
Some say meaning is my mind’s attempt to assert itself on the world.
The world resists my will by the transcendence of inert indifference to me.
More so every day, accepted methods of knowing don’t see any of us as real.
I can’t trust my senses when my reality’s become abstract.
Dangling potential baits me still, but I don’t know what I will lose if I do
and I don’t know what I will miss if I don’t. Necessity not free will makes me choose.
I wish I could remove all of the glorious meaning tattoos from my soul
but I’m torn by the thought of it, all of it so much a skintight part of me now.
Reaching bottom, I pray there is a reason why everything turned out this way.
If the crisis of my soul was engineered to be like this, that is bad enough.
But if my crisis is purely random and chaotic, in fact no one’s plan, then
the terror of such an end state cannot be surmounted. For in truth
there is no one to fight, nothing to overcome. Chaos itself seduced me
to tattoo my soul with meaning. Random nothingness fueled my drives
to project that meaning onto others. Purposeless chance and crazed hope drove me
to link my soul’s tattoos with things outside of myself. Vapid rationals for feeling
filled 24,500 days with pathetic emotion. I suffer now from a fall into what was
always to be inevitable ennui, there’s no reason or restitution or redemption to salvage.
I wonder what image I would have of myself without the meaning tattoos on my soul.
Who would I be to myself? In turn, what attitude would I have towards others?
Is it maturity or resignation to say I don’t know how to separate meaning
from everything external to me? The two are one as sure as transcending paradox
mediates dilemma. But to hold both together too dearly is to suffer,
to lose one’s way to oneself. The wind whistles around me once again.
I cannot ignore the suggestion it gives. It may seem that pulling meaning back
into oneself, being content to find it inside is a negation of living,
a denial of emotional involvement in life, when in fact the opposite is true.
Only by retaining meaning within will the outside phantoms make un-suffering sense.
Meaning is experienced by being. It is not projected by desire and inked on the soul.
The rocky sand crunches under my feet, reminding me of hard facts.
The wind’s suggestion sounds pithy, a gem insight from a sacred space.
But where I live doesn’t have the luxury of the sacred. Sacred and profane
are a philosophical dualism, an intellectual neo-construct, a self-limiting musing.
Where I live is a continuum of the detailed gray existing in between.
The hour is late, the desert cools into darkness, but even in the dark
I can see the tattoos on my soul, my projections of meaning coupled to the outside other.
They have been there so long I fear I have given them a meta-meaning of their own.
How can they be removed when I have come to identify with them so unconsciously?
I sit on the sand in the dark unable to escape the ants of my mind.
The glide of moon rise coaxes me to contemplate what’s left to do.
I can live out the rest of my days resigned to accept there’s nothing more to be done
or I can lose myself in activity and hope I forget what I did to my soul.
To be honest with myself at this point is to embrace the tragedy as triumph.
I wound up here by living all of my meaning as a collection of beautiful stains,
incredible indelible marks of impassioned foolishness congealed as living art,
shaped together on a whim as a limiting self-portrait reflected onto myself,
leaving me no more space to be more, leaving no more time to recover,
and now, nearing the end, I bear little more than the garish marks
of my aroused animal, the meaningful beast,
I go to the high desert, to a place as barren as my spirit.
I need to be alone and yet I find others there with me.
I cannot see them. They pass around as whistles in the wind.
They find me a curiosity, a sad tumble weed within a sack of flesh.
They urge me to share my rambling pain. I don’t trust their interest
but there’s no way to hide my thoughts. I’m determined to ignore them.
I aim my steps for a far horizon and sink within the mirage of me.
Ripples of light blaze on the sand, burning away the dust devils
encircling dry bones, the very things in me never forgotten or denied.
A scorpion in the shadow of a cactus brandishes its tail hook, as if to say,
“And now I will show you the most excellent way.”
The orthodox radicalism of my agnostic dogma befalls parasitic processing.
I hear a suggestion, unsettling the spell -- thought breaks things apart,
emotions solidify them together. But what good is there liberating the light
in a place with nothing left to shine on?
If love exists it only proves that God is not bound by rationality.
Wisdom is not falling into despair over the truth of one’s fate.
A rock falls nearby and I accept that it’s not trying to get where it belongs.
In life, fullness is more than duration and yet the desert is timeless.
My soul is covered with tattoos, each tattoo a meaning I made an essential part of me.
And now there is no space left within me to tattoo. My soul is covered with them.
Drives and desires ink tattoos of meaning on our eager souls,
those craven canvasses of purpose. We collect them with ardent energy
then live with them with mixed feelings and a dread of rational satori.
I assume it is possible to be happy, even in a palace,
and yet the fate of all things is an absurdity.
The point in heaven existing at all is to convince us to accept death
even though everyone will die but not everyone has lived.
The despairing hole in being is sucking the salient light away,
but why after all does a need exist for a light beam in the empty space of me?
Wisdom is knowing what is and isn’t in my control but how do I discern between?
I fuse my meaning to the objects I project it on and become confused,
an inner conflict ignites. The things and people and experiences out there
must be mere shadows on the wall of intended consummation, for even when
they initially appear as meaning’s satisfaction attained, the achievement hollows out
in time with changes and a closer examination of what eventually occurs
when the outside element asserts itself through its own projected meaning.
The illusion of mutual dreams realized via a link to meaning never matches either goal.
Why is it so hard to accept? Things outside of me are not in my control
and tattooing meaning on my soul’s image of the outside objects of desire
will never make it so. I am told I cannot know The One.
I can only become The One. Likewise, should I say I cannot find my meaning,
I only become my meaning? If only I had a clear soul, a pristine canvass
free of my lived meaning, perhaps then I could reflect clarity in lieu of certainty,
maybe then I would put into action what my soul truly is and always was.
Some say meaning is my mind’s attempt to assert itself on the world.
The world resists my will by the transcendence of inert indifference to me.
More so every day, accepted methods of knowing don’t see any of us as real.
I can’t trust my senses when my reality’s become abstract.
Dangling potential baits me still, but I don’t know what I will lose if I do
and I don’t know what I will miss if I don’t. Necessity not free will makes me choose.
I wish I could remove all of the glorious meaning tattoos from my soul
but I’m torn by the thought of it, all of it so much a skintight part of me now.
Reaching bottom, I pray there is a reason why everything turned out this way.
If the crisis of my soul was engineered to be like this, that is bad enough.
But if my crisis is purely random and chaotic, in fact no one’s plan, then
the terror of such an end state cannot be surmounted. For in truth
there is no one to fight, nothing to overcome. Chaos itself seduced me
to tattoo my soul with meaning. Random nothingness fueled my drives
to project that meaning onto others. Purposeless chance and crazed hope drove me
to link my soul’s tattoos with things outside of myself. Vapid rationals for feeling
filled 24,500 days with pathetic emotion. I suffer now from a fall into what was
always to be inevitable ennui, there’s no reason or restitution or redemption to salvage.
I wonder what image I would have of myself without the meaning tattoos on my soul.
Who would I be to myself? In turn, what attitude would I have towards others?
Is it maturity or resignation to say I don’t know how to separate meaning
from everything external to me? The two are one as sure as transcending paradox
mediates dilemma. But to hold both together too dearly is to suffer,
to lose one’s way to oneself. The wind whistles around me once again.
I cannot ignore the suggestion it gives. It may seem that pulling meaning back
into oneself, being content to find it inside is a negation of living,
a denial of emotional involvement in life, when in fact the opposite is true.
Only by retaining meaning within will the outside phantoms make un-suffering sense.
Meaning is experienced by being. It is not projected by desire and inked on the soul.
The rocky sand crunches under my feet, reminding me of hard facts.
The wind’s suggestion sounds pithy, a gem insight from a sacred space.
But where I live doesn’t have the luxury of the sacred. Sacred and profane
are a philosophical dualism, an intellectual neo-construct, a self-limiting musing.
Where I live is a continuum of the detailed gray existing in between.
The hour is late, the desert cools into darkness, but even in the dark
I can see the tattoos on my soul, my projections of meaning coupled to the outside other.
They have been there so long I fear I have given them a meta-meaning of their own.
How can they be removed when I have come to identify with them so unconsciously?
I sit on the sand in the dark unable to escape the ants of my mind.
The glide of moon rise coaxes me to contemplate what’s left to do.
I can live out the rest of my days resigned to accept there’s nothing more to be done
or I can lose myself in activity and hope I forget what I did to my soul.
To be honest with myself at this point is to embrace the tragedy as triumph.
I wound up here by living all of my meaning as a collection of beautiful stains,
incredible indelible marks of impassioned foolishness congealed as living art,
shaped together on a whim as a limiting self-portrait reflected onto myself,
leaving me no more space to be more, leaving no more time to recover,
and now, nearing the end, I bear little more than the garish marks
of my aroused animal, the meaningful beast,
to show for a life misspent as meaning's folly.
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