The Grip of Control

Three places, a fractaling of reality:

A war, a hole, and a dance of totality

To be gripped by one, to cling to another

To release into dance, to defiantly untether

Emerging as one birthed as a bolus unto war

Into entropic depths, from solace wast he tore

Danger and dread, permitted with every sound

Helplessness descends, dysfunction surrounds

To arm, to fight, it grants control, yet still

To join is to sin amidst the bullet’s trill

Thus he who is begotten of battle must run,

Refuging from submission to the will of the gun

The patter of dirt the roving foot dost tread

To slink and fall, as one roaming dead

Amidst violent waves of the world, the young man crests a shoal

And crawling as with nothing, he surmounts, inverted, confined to the hole

A tear is shed within the placid security that surrounds:

The dark, unforeboding permanence of grounds

Hopeful and stark, the man takes control

Shaping and crafting the life of a mole

In such solitudinous juncture, the piercing streak of brokenness doth not resound

Is it within this sanctuary of interiority that peace is found?

Could within these hollow walls be crafted others of clay?

Could the will of the mind bode them to stay?

Could love be conjured here in a world of his own?

Could within this singularity be finally found home?

Time passes, and crashes, and bores its reserve

Within the mind, hazy clouds of imperception perturb

The distancing of man from the horrors of war

Distanced him too from the world of yore

An atom bouncing about a self-fashioned cage

As a bird within bars, beauty confined, nay, staged

Without true encounter, what is it for?

A life trudged through, guarded for oneself — a pit and nothing more

The mental fugue, drifting him warily from Earth, dashes its dissonances upon the man

The tumult borne, the depth of descent, foments longing one cannot stand

And then to the lay lies the man to the morn

Upon this still stillness, a dream was thus born

A ballroom, reprieve — dignity lacking deceit

With indwelling stillness, the man strides to meet

A figure comes to grasp, not to add nor subtract

But to divinely encounter through meritorious act

Not as retreat, but as courage one must don

Far beyond the tremulous fire, now contracted as song

The two bodies meet, expectations defied

To the adventure of life art their movements allied

The means become the ends in tender embrace

The static diffused within the closing of space

The free gift and receipt of control amidst safety of self and the other

Births a dance that bares danger, dread, and the reclusion of artifice asunder

Explanation in Prose:

Upon dark earth was a man once born, imbibed with and within the horrors of sin. Throughout his young life, emerged a war — surrounding, threatening, defining him. He ran through it and around it and attempted to flee, but wherever he went presented the same darkness, and with each discovery of this kind, the darkness only appeared to grow further still. Exasperated, this solitary figure fell hopelessly upon the ground, and he crawled through life until, upon the edge of endless sea, he fell into a hole. Thus, he sunk underground, and the sounds of gunfire were deafened as a new darkness took hold. In the cavernous expanse of the man’s surroundings, all was still, safe, and uncorrupted, and yet it was also all so painfully interior and lonesome. The man crafted a life within this solitude, but, with time, all things withered. He forced reality into being but then it betrayed him nonetheless by virtue of its soullessness, its insincerity, and its capacity to distance him forever farther from the world — its pain and transcendence. First numbing came to the mind, and then a perpetual static, and, amidst this, the man drifted seamlessly into sleep. In the dream therein, the man was untethered, free from both the terror of vice and the compensatory alienation of self from all that it touches. The man, in clothes untainted from stain, emerged into a glorious ballroom, with the overarching conflagration of the old, familiar war being reduced to nothing more than a distant melody to which these victors danced. And our hero, triumphantly himself, embraced another, similarly arrayed. The two figures, bathed in light, danced with one another, grasping and letting go. The act was not in response to or in pursuit of anything: It was simply the tranquil existence within the giving and taking of control.