My footprints
are washed from the sand
by the desert wind.
I stand at the foot of a shattered statue a fellow traveler once described as 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone", hand holding my shemaugh over my mouth to keep out the sand.
I come
-- something between a pilgrim and a ghost --
to look on the works of the king of kings and despair.
The wind whistles through the legs and over the half buried head which lies tilted up out of the sand near the statue's base.
I sit in the spare shade of the legs,
as I do every year,
and let my eyes wander about the empty desert, taking some comfort in the shared company of the forgotten monument.
I pray to a nameless god, the phantom lord of all forgotten things, that something of Ozymandius endures.
Posted by
The Alchemist
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Posted by
The Alchemist
comments (0)
Fall
has come.
I
sit at my desk
in
the dark
wrapped
in blankets
A
pale light
casts
my face as marble.
I
read from
Thomas De Quincey's
Confessions
of an Opium Eater.
"My
dreams were accompanied
by
deep-seated anxiety
and
gloomy melancholy,
such
as are wholly incommunicable by words.
I
seemed every night
to
descend,
into
chasms and sunless abysses,
depths
below depths,
from
which it seemed hopeless
that
I could ever reascend."
With
an opium pipe,
I
could slip deep
into reveries
transcend,
roiling
back
to
sit beside De Quincey
as
he sweats,
tossing
and turning in his bed,
trying,
failing
to
wean himself
from
the drug that is killing him.
I
would hold his hand
in
the dark - and tell him
he
isn't alone.
Perhaps,
together,
we
might find some way
out
of the abyss.