I know you're not dead, but you're not very much alive. So this is your elegy, though I write it for me. I know the Beast that sits on your chest and sucks life from you minute by dreadfully long minute. I've danced that minuet of depression and destroyed worlds with that same passive-aggressive tango. You search for pain in upper and lower GI's. The physician's latex-wrapped finger probing your bowels for an answer. Like the fabled pelican, I would feed you on my own blood. But even this heavy laden bill cannot force feed you. I need the stiff, brilliant bill of the oystercatcher to crack you open. You need to come out of your shell, or like the fish I would feed you, you will rot in the illuminating noonday sun from which you hide. The only spark in your life is the match held to the tip of your cheap cigarettes. See how the flame beginning on the side always consumes the circumference evenly down to the filter dangling between two passive yellow fingers? The paper burns blue and covers you in a haze never joined by the grey of exhaled smoke -- you hold everything in! You don't have the flare of these shooting stars screaming through the ozone to fiery deaths. You have no atmosphere to stop the assault of cosmic rocks pock-marking your arid surface. Your exterior bears the impression of decades of collisions with the boulders of karma. No meteor's trail, your long slow burn is a fuse burning down to a. . . . . dud. Then, just as the child in you reaches. . . . POW!! and vision is gone. You say the stars rule your fate, but you never look up. Staring at your immobile feet, you only find the occasional snipe and unlucky pennies. Slow shuffles and long drags only feed the Beast. Yes, I know that Beast, it hounds my steps as I think to rescue you. My sandal picks up a stone, a risk of being open. No, I will not carry this pain for you. I shake the pebble as quickly as it enters.

Copyright � 1996 Ian Lynch. All rights reserved