Desire

Have I begun my final search for beauty in this grasp of time? I feel the weight of change upon my head, upon my body, and my heart. It is so heavy, like the universe shriveled into a stone to be worn on the neck of Atlas, the day of his death, the day of all eternity that must come and go . . . Oh, Tantalus, how you must be sickened by the taste of your own son in your mouth . . . or were you simply distracted by beauty, by love, by power? Were those sickened by your love wrong to send you to immortal suffering? How about now? How may I be tested in this world where what I love is not real? I send my friends to bed cut into pieces, awaiting for me to devour them when their hands can no longer protect their lovely faces . . . The joy of it all is within their eyes, the last look absent of understood control, of peace, of freedom like all things in the cosmos that fly past the colors of an abrasive humanity . . . like Jesus crying out to his father, who he cannot find . . . Capote . . . Oedipus . . . all of us who are not sons of one man, but of all who have stayed up at night to hear the stars tell their secrets . . . I am the city, I am the oceans, I am the undead living . . . hear my cry as I offer up my kin to the gods who will reject me . . . forever will I push up the universe, forever it shall know my name . . . Desire.