The Architect

Nestled deep in the yawning abyss,

Waxy teardrops dribble from a lambent candle

Burning for stale celebrations of

Disremembered dreams.

Beside the flickering beacon rests a man,

The architect,

The all-seeing eye,

The arbiter of the universal mind.

The candle glows for one man’s dying memory.

Fables once cherished and chanted by the masses,

Now faintly echo in the empty expanse

For the architect to ponder in somber stillness.

Shadows steadily slink,

Slowly choking light.

The dim flame cries:

A flood is coming.

The man fishes for fleeting reflections,

In the shady burrow of the strange mind

Grasping for decaying delusions.

Deliberate demise disguised by promise.

In this hollow bunker of the unconscious,

The architect of his destiny, as the cycle commands,

Watches wistfully as night swallows the final spark,

Anxiously rising to start anew.

Discovery

And it's funny how you get most nervous just before the dawn...when the rays of the sun are nearest the horizon, and the faintest breeze feels coolest against your skin. I think it's because there's a certain anticipation of what's to come. Like just because the end is near, you fear now more than ever you won't make it. Like approaching the brink of daylight leaves you most vulnerable because you cease to pay attention to how you're getting there; you're already looking ahead to tomorrow's first rays.

"The night is always darkest before the dawn." Is it darkest? Or just so displacing, so removed from the other 23 hours and 30 minutes of our day that we can't really figure out how to describe it? Night is night, dark and damp and cold. And day is day, clear and warm and assuring. But the dawn is a strange mixture of the two. You're either running from something, eager to jump into the daylight of tomorrow, or fearing what's next, wanting to hide in the shadows of yesterday.

And dawn is where those notions sort of fade into an emotional limbo where you can remove yourself from everything and sit back and watch the world literally turn a page in its history; yes, you watch the world as often the sun's first rays watch you. Yesterday becomes a blurred memory, just a reminder of the experiences you've had, and tomorrow is still but a faint notion of your imagination. You're free to forget about the world at dawn, you're free to exist animals should, free to enjoy so instinctively everything your eyes were meant to see.

If there ever were a heaven on earth, I think you'd find it just beyond the dawn's foggy face. And really it's too bad we've been taught to sleep through that special hour.