A Requiem for a Kiwi

Muses of pain are the best fed muses. Nothing suckles energy and spits out art as misery fed muses. They drink long and they drink deep and for all their vampiric hag-like appearance and tendencies I say they help.

They are like the witch doctors that sucks out the snake poison then lay feverish themselves for days, akin to the doctor who amputates the leg under fire and the hundreds who die in every forlorn hope.

The muses of pain are companions in the lightless thickets where insanity awaits. They are the slivers of purpose and sanity that go down with us to the darkest recesses of the human psyche, our own distressed mind.

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"; means nothing to us. We have gone and returned.

We are in the end alone and in that sense we form the paradox of human life. We are so wound up inside ourselves sometimes. We rage inside our skulls and we curl up in tears within our souls feeling like the Last Person on Earth.

As we throw our birth shawls off and we give ourselves unto the battlefield and the hearth, both that are life. Innocence dies, it dies in a way that it can never be brought back to life from. We can never go back. We are something else from there on, something else. We are dead and now we must find something to put in the place of our carefree innocence.

Innocence is the frailest breakable thing but we must kill it or it'll die. In parts as a whole and that is what sets us apart from each other further. Sometimes we feel we are alone in an earth with billions of individuals. Has there ever been a more silly illusion? It is no illusion because we are alone at least inside our heads, as individuals but physically? that feeling is the illusion.

Yet would life not be pointless if we truly were? Would life not be pointless if there were no other people? We crave oblivion and we crave nothing when there are many things.

For every moment of contentment a thousand bleeding cut awaits. Humanity is built on it and we lie to ourselves about it.

Where is victory without sacrifice? Where is happiness without pain? Where do we find fulfillment without suffering? Where do we find growth without obstacles?

Demons that stalk the night. Demons that stalk our souls. Demons we've made for ourselves. Quake you bastards tremble!

All the suffering of mankind can be poured into me, all the nightmares. All the senses of futility, overwhelming, agony and tragedy.

We are human and this is our bread and butter. This is life. We are not that above the wild dogs ripping the guts out of a struggling buffalo in the African savanna. Yet.

All we have when the lights go out, when were alone and despairing in ourselves. We are frail and scared as we've always been but we've lied to ourselves about it. We deceit ourselves no more. A lie? A deception? Was it?

We are alone. We are alone in the dark. We are alone within ourselves. Oh lucky one! Turn yourself within your mind! Forge it like a blade. Temper it with tears and experience so it may strike ever truer with every refinement.

Manipulate the world, reach and achieve and when we must rest like all living things must, go with the vagaries of fate but hold on to that diamond hard core that is you. When the challenge is too great relent, like the wild dog that can't bring down the bull. Retreat like the wise general and the balanced tactician.

All the demons that terrify us would banish to their hells. They would shriek and tear themselves if they caught but a glimpse. A glimpse of the human spirit in full swing and what it can achieve. It can topple gods from their gilded altars, it can reach the stars and sail amongst them. It can overcome anything if you just but let it.

We are flawed beauty. We are good and evil. We are the cosmos simplified and plunged into the skull of a half evolved ape. We are everything and we are nothing.

What are we? We are sparks in the darkness. We light on in a brilliant flash, we diminish, then we sputter and then we die.

Yet we can burn so bright and we can light anything. We can light the worlds within us and we can illuminate the world outside us.

We can remake them, mankind is nothing if not imaginative.

We make pearls and throw them to swine and we make pearls and we give them to our children. Humanity is based on extremes that make it border on paradox.

I am I, me and us. I am everything. I am nothing.

Take solace within yourself or without yourself. Introvert or extrovert I don't care just never stop the journey. Never stop and limit yourself to past glories or give in to the bitter seed of defeat.

Journey whatever world you wish. Run, crawl, stumble, walk or jog but never stop.

Not all who wander are lost and journeys are still journeys even if they don't have destinations. Learn from the past and remember it but never let it affect the present like a material wraith.

The past is immaterial the same way the water you bathe in the stream once isn't the same next time you go. Same stream but different waters. That is life.

An individual can be anything or everything and he can be nothing as well.

Per ardua ad astra. Be they within ourselves or beyond our skies.