(By madness, I mean the clean madness of bright-eyed fools, not the
worn down, worn in grooves of sorrow etched into ourselves. Carved by
boredom, by sorrow and by fear... not the horror of grit, scrubbing
off our flesh, but the smoothness of sea glass gone so far past its
original design.)
There is a tug of war between the mundane and the dream. We stand
with our backs to the precipice and wonder about the chills on our
spines and the tension of leaning forward. I have lost the time I set
aside for being unfocused, for sifting my fingers through dirt and
remembering the dead, living in kingdoms within civilizations.
Mosquitoes of responsibility dive-bomb our minds until our thoughts
itch and our brains quiver and never do we think to turn around, to
face the deep darkness and with hands trembling, spring forward. We
are afraid to let go of the dusty edges of daily sanity. With these
eyes, we see - adulthood is drudgery (the sucking sounds of a
manufactured mud pit can be heard).
I will press my hands together and pray my own song to my daily bath,
to the lines of my signature, to the bills swirling in drifts at my
feet, to the dreams which wrap their gauzy arms around my throat and
turn my head to look... at beauty, at filth, at sorrow, at myself.
My grip slips a little, and suddenly I am plunging, not into something
unknown, but into my life. Into the center of my reality, which I
watched from the edges with such tightness around my heart. This is
the cliff, this is the tension - can I take my life as I have taken
clay and can I make of it what I wish? Or will it slip through my
fingers, hardening into something I never intended?
The fear has paralyzed us - the truth is not absolute. The clay will
become something I have made, but nothing I thought it would be. And
so long as I continue to shape it, it will change. To stop is...