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Darkness Stays
My soul is always with me
In the moonlight, in the breezes,
In all the quiet places
Where time and space will place me.
Faces, once around me, all around me,
Have dissipated in the haze
Of a welcome morning.
I am never alone,
Even in the densest crowd.
My soul is my company,
My companion and my shroud.
But more than that, a proxy,
An ambassador from above,
A little sliver of existence
Sprung from sacred satisfaction.
It is me, yet it is not me,
More likely to be charity
By word and thought and deed
Than the fleshy prison
It calls "me."
It instills the tendency
To caw and weep and grin
At universal connection,
And yet it does not overextend
Affection, crossing lines
To consternation, to chagrin.
"Close your eyes," it tells me
"To wickedness and sin.
You are not part of evil
And there is no greed within."
So I humour my soul by smiling,
Always nodding, I concur.
But somewhere there's a secret chamber
In the dark part of my heart
That my soul has never seen,
A place it's never been,
Never will be if I say,
And under lock and key
Of blood and beating one would see
The faintest taint of sickness
That's within humanity.
I don't condemn my rage,
Though few others are justified,
And I have gladly lied,
Without grief, without guilt,
Without shame and without blame,
If it would spare a wound
Or inconvenience.
I am righteous in my anger
And holy in my deceit,
For love is the fuel
Of my heart-fire,
And love's the conflagration
That will leap and swoop
And all-too-soon consume
This fleshy prison-pyre.
And when I am but ashes
My chamber, it will open
And my darkness will erupt,
A spray of sable splendour
Set to seize my simple soul
As it ascends against the toll
Of gravity and grave,
Against no odds ascending
To the place from whence it came.
But darkness, it can't reach so far
And next to souls it's slow
Because souls, you see,
They travel at the speed of light
To places darkness cannot go.
But even when the soul's returned
To massive finity
To recommune with countless siblings
In the stars, the sands, the seas,
The darkness carries on
In the minds and mires of mortal men.
And the soul? It soon forgets its trials
And its brief battle below
And one can only dream and hope
That if there's one seed sown
In darkness, that it's love.
It's not the only seed, in darkness,
That could ever dare to thrive,
Ever dare to grow.
The darkness will not die
But will carry on in flesh
To build new soul prisons,
Then hide itself in secret chambers.
Our only hope is that seeds
Of love are sown by more lives
Than seeds of greed,
Because darkness is supreme
In its unyielding fertility,
And tiny tendrils elsewhere
Are towering trees
In its warm and tight embrace.
It's war, man, swarm, race...
It is darkness, and it stays.
