Poison

Poison

If one drinks from a bottle marked 'Poison' it is almost certain to disagree with one, sooner or later.

When all happiness leaves you, when it bleeds out like your very lifeblood to fill the people around you with its treacherous and glamourous magic, when it leaves you empty and wanting and wasting away inside, what is left?

Nothing.

Not the existentialist yearning celebrated by poets and artists, that well that bores deep into our consciousness to fill with a bubbling spring of insight and awareness and expression. Not the melodramatic sobbing screaming aching pain experienced by the young and the simple hearted and those caught in the first unexpected undertow of grief.

Just nothing.

And so not for me is the stormy mourning of friends and lovers, of teachers and family and places I have known. Neither the laying of the bodies

"...dust to dust..."

nor the raising of the immense stone monuments has touched me.

Not for me is the wild wave of elation that sweeps through our world to wash away last vestiges of fear and hate that have shaken our cores. My core is empty and hollow without its familiar balance, sitting crooked within my crooked self.

Nor even for me the quiet dignity of a hero, that soft and steady light of righteousness that permeates all that is good. Up until that last moment I had basked in it but now the world seems cold.

For me, only a barren and dusty garden of memories that shall seed and be swept up by the winds of time and blown beyond my borders to flower in some distant unplottable place.

Nothing comes from nothing we are told and in the ordinary way this is true so it is against all that is natural that in the empty cauldron I have become there should be brewing. Yet I carefully tend it, waiting for the steam to settle and the final colour to come clear.

Somehow it seems right that the first taste of this unnaturalness inside me should be bitter and burning in the back of my throat.

***

It is the truth of ourselves that we will fight valiantly both the natural movement of time as it works on our bodies and the abhorrent evil that rises up to consume our minds. We fight these great battles without a thought

"...not about choice, there was never a choice - this is just how it is..."

but we will succumb quietly to defeat at our own hands. We will defend time and time again our right to destroy ourselves in the way and time that we choose.

That time comes for me now, the time when I will willingly lay down my life so that the vitriol consuming me from within may not have it. For this creeping, dissolving coldness there is only one cure.

Healing is the art of knowing which poison will counteract the one working inside you and it is healing I seek now as I raise the goblet

"... used to be one of a set, but the other's long gone and we thought you might like to have it..."

to my lips and drink deeply of the bitterness I have created.

Terminus Est