“Don’t tell me to smile. Don’t tell me to be happy. Don’t tell me what thoughts I should have and what thoughts I should not have. Don’t give me a list of ten ways to be better, to know better, to live better. Don’t point me to the right or left. To the star or to the saint. Just love me. Better yet, love yourself. All I need is a heart, eyes that are awake, and a place to rest the ways of the world that are not me. I am not taken in by who I am supposed to be in someone else’s eyes. I am taken in by the beauty that is me. I am already everything and All. If everyone could see they are too, there would be nothing of truths to tell.” ~ Everyday Aspergers

The Echo

A me that slips behind the scene knew this would be…

He watches with calm interest as I make my way down the river, less driftwood than pioneer on a raft with beating paddle.

I can see him, this undone one of none, the way he stands back and lets me be, watches as this illusioned I meanders from this truth to another; his kindly grin in the bleakest moments of darkness; his hands strong.

A cradle awaits.

Still this determination that bleeds out righteousness.

This will momentarily unbearable in its strength and stellar.

A hankering, this lingering, this potent folly of not being able to shake self from self.

To describe would do injustice, and to not describe would cause further agonizing despair.

For how to tell what I am, through I am, seems to produce jeopardy—two battled two, then four, and then more.

Swordsmen swift, many in count, each timber for the maker, each wood to be chopped, each, once tree, now distant edges merging into their own shadow.

A labyrinth of the huntsman, the hunter and the hunted same;

Each a mirror staring down a mirror, and each unnerved and brought up for game.

I is sliced and rendered empty.

Slaughtered and sacrificed.

And still this ever present, ever changing presence remains.

The one cannot help but think I am illusion.

How could I be anything else?

And even illusion, being something, is transformed into the thought of nothing, by the floating mind that reasons further in invisible plundering.

To move in such a distinct rhythm of naught.

Being here, then being gone, then being here much changed.

Tinkering toys of this world, and smile, the child’s smile— teeth wide and unburdened, stomach growing, fed upon canary two-fold.

To eat away at this place I thinks I is.

To eat away at what I think be sight.

To make morsel out of fantasy.

To understand the doctrines inside the explicit words of absence.

And bite into the existence of others’ thoughts, when their thoughts are built upon the ponds of nothing.

How and where to find the start of truth is ceasing to appear explicitly lost before found.

The maker dead before rendering wholeness.

The absoluteness evaporated before finalized.

All these trumpeting warriors blended into the background of reclaiming selves before first step is made on a path where footsteps are not held.

A witness to the soldiers before these carved eyes, in their bleakness and plight, screaming out for the way that never comes, through shadows of soul-bled sorrow.

How can so many exist and still further emerge, and where do they walk if not upon some very beating spirit?

I know not what I do or who I am, and this is insignificant compared to the ghosts I watch, to the empty places I thought were one, to the solidness dissipating, and to the rules clinging to the mass of nothing, as choking vine.

Only to be dismissed by the thousand witnesses birthed.

Still she comes, this form, this lost victimless one of none.

For no victim remains when foe is banished.

Yet, she cries holding the thousands of deaths in full arms, the one after the other burdened and unquenchable.

The captain in charge of the mourning, of the dissipation of one phantom begotten onto another.

Goodbye, she whispers, her hand gauntly and appetite diminished, her mind wavering between a place of no thought and every thought.

Her emptiness dismissed by her want and need for explanation, in a land that whispers without voice and forethought: there exists no need.

But if all that she is be need, then what is she?

Again she dies upon self, self-inflicted no more, pierced by the echo of evergreen.

How can she be this ghost of unraveling;

Her death made known to no one and no thing?

Her heart pierced by what ifs and circumstance that never need rise, since all is fallen.

She walks in the forest, a demon twisted into raven, a plastered wall onto herself, lost between the space leading from one room to another.

Until all rooms explode and the house is hovering in the existence of space.

And still the house crumbles and woman bled dry remains, withered and emptied of soul.

And here she wavers, a distant shell.

The only passerby another illusioned being that hears the self’s whisper of ocean wave gone.

A distant calling centered at the dolphin’s heart—he too swimming in a pool of imaginings.

He too wondering where the trees have gone.