(How many roads?)

Stood on the banks of a stream with forces amassed, looking on towards the journey-defining second decade of adulthood.

A man must have the presence of mind, the perspicacity to acknowledge himself and hence possess the ability to adapt. For consciousness of the need to change is assailed perpetually by deluge of implacable ego. The desire to be right is lazy and disingenuously self-affirming. The journey is not complete upon arrival at the bank of the stream. No, herein lies the true journey’s beginning. Growth is not automatic; the termination of adolescence has seen to that. Now you must choose and, unlike most, drive on.

Did all the accumulated words and actions of the first manual stage merely hang around you, suspended in ether, phantasmal and as static as the breeze decided? Have they passed through you as free radical energies; bizarre, sporadic and beautiful; ephemeral and aimless? That I would resign?

Resign now as the full force of experience tears through the shroud at the speed of light, revealing awesome vistas of unimagined potentialities that dilate and heighten the blackness to indescribable focus, unintelligible expression, full-circle to blankness, bursting the dams and overwhelming the moist, biological matter?

Ford!

Charge on in mind of the muses.

This is the time, always now is the time. Resign? Whilst all routes of all extant fabric point irrefutably to the immanent, right here NOW NOW NOW… ad infinitum.

I feel nothing now but know that in the place where this void gapes dumbly once dwelt an irreverent sneer. Resign and join you in complacent, vapid bleats afore a perennial grey pre-morning: intoxication comfortingly burning the skin from within and the milky mist and you and the interminable cold without? Join you in the reciprocal nemesis and brotherhood of the likewise-damned?; The two-way Stockholm syndrome?; Beneath the web that delimits the permissible height, so wretchedly low as to suppress all ascent and ensure that we all are equal so that none may incite envy. But we all are bitter. We clamour below and hurt each other in the name of fraternity. We scheme, but, each mutually assured of the treacherous intent of each, we pay lip service to the strange conformity with chests protruding and divide subject and object whilst feeling no conflict. The terrible truth. Truth, the taboo: weapon, unusable, of mutually assured destruction, amassed to the point of insanity but remaining, still… unusable. Resign now and join you in aimless scuttling, clambering over one another?; Cutting circles until the mundane, insane end? As again you bray at me before a faceless dream throng. Sickeningly assured and gapingly absent. Contorted of face to a degree achievable only in the absolute certainty of camaraderie adduced by the bully in his audience. But this is the dream of nudity, the will to exhibition and I have read indifference in a representative of the faceless. Neutrality effective as defection. These are masks of anonymity that I see crowded behind you. Your scornful construction contorts gymnastically in baseless self-assurity upon foundations of sand. How now that you are deserted?

I ford the brook with the full force of accumulated knowledge into the life-defining second decade of adulthood and pass to where the hounds cannot follow my scent.

© John Lowndes, April 2015