man lonely emotion alone dormant break 750x410 - The Pain

The Pain

My empty eyes look towards the heavens. The sky, foreboding and forlorn. Hanging there like a proscenium in ruin, spotted with dark clouds looking like so many bits of cracked plaster waiting to peel back and fall down upon my skull.

A cold wind blows from the east, ushering in the night, which spreads across the land like a blanket of impenetrable ebony. A velveteen wraith spreading its bony limbs to all four corners of the heavens, as if to reach out with its decaying hands to rip asunder the curtain of protective daylight revealing the nocturnal void of darkness that lays just behind.

Like the ashes of the Phoenix yet to be reborn, black as pitch hiding the world in a depressing neverland of darkness, where all manner of beast come to satiate their desires, both sublime and gross.

Even the silvery light from the moon is obscured by the gathering cumulation of vaporous water in the firmament of infinity. My heart beats slow and ponderous, echoing in my ears, the only break from the deathly still silence permeating the landscape like an icy funeral shroud. The beating of the heart continues, almost mockingly, a bitter reminder that my wretched existence continues unabated. How I wish it would burst forth from its prison of flesh, blood, and bone, to fall upon the ground and ebb profusely its crimson liquid of life, ending my miserable existence on this pitiless ball of rock.

All the colors of love and companionship fade to an obsidian haze. The endless empty pit of my soul reverberates with disdain. The ages pass and nibble at my flesh like so many demons, withering away my youth until I am a decrepit and frail reflection of happier times.

copyright © 2016 Gene Chiovari

lonely

The Sadness

  A coyote howled to the moon in an empty desert, crying out proof of his existence. 

“I am here, I exist!”

  But the desert is empty and unforgiving, and no one is there to hear the cries. 

 “I am here! I exist! Find me.”

  The howel, a lonely painful wail rolling out across the cold desert, only the wind and the sand and the nothingness hear the cry, and they do not respond. 

 “I am here! I exist! Love me.”

  The sound of the howl, wavering and Unsure, like some wayward string instrument on the verge of becoming out of tune. 

 “I am here! I exist! I know not what I look for, but I know I must find it. I exist, I exist.”

  Even the Moon turns his back on the coyote, hiding behind a lone cloud in the sky, the silvery glow now defused, obscuring further the vision of the path to be taken. Still, quiet, no sound except for the breaking heart expressed through the howl. 

 “I exist! I matter! To someone, somewhere… Maybe….”

  The only response this time is the desert wind which briefly picks up speed, lifting sand up into the air and throwing it wildly about, like an expressive dance, a dervish, somehow paralleling the emptiness and the pain in the coyotes outcry. 

  For brief moment the coyote and the dervish meet, sending sand stinging at the skin like tiny little pinpricks and stinging at the eyes, blurring a vision that the coyote already did not trust to see clearly. 

“I exist! But do I matter? Is there no one to hear me, is there no one to share my existence?”

  The wind and the dervish have died down, leaving the coyote alone once again not even the pain and irritation of the small sandstorm to keep him company. The cloud has moved and the moon shines once again, this time it seems almost mocking. 

“Am I here? Do I exist? Do I matter, to somebody… Somewhere….”

  The coyote cried out once again, but this time even the sound of his own howl could not convince him of the validity of his existence, Could not convince him he was real, therefore he could not be convinced that he really mattered anymore to anybody, anywhere…. 

“Why am I here! How can I exist? Why am I not real?”

  He looked out across the endless expanse of the desert, lit only by the moonlight. Looked out in every direction, and still no one was there, no one heard, no one was coming. 

 “I am not here, I do not exist, I do not matter, to anybody… Anywhere…”

  And the coyote stop howling, stopped crying out, stopped trying to convince himself that he mattered, and stopped looking for what he knew not, but knew he must find. His soul laid bare and open for anyone to see, if only there was somebody there to see it. To see it’s emptiness, and it’s longing to be filled, it’s unquenchable thirst, it’s need to be loved, it’s need to matter, to somebody, somewhere… it’s need to exist for more than just the sake of existence itself.

  Alone, in the emptiness, in the unforgiving silence of the cool desert night, the coyote never made another sound again and eventually cease to exist. 

And no one ever knew. 

copyright 2016, Gene Chiovari