Like The Shrike

In the undertone there are the wasted notes of a man who lost his voice. The shrike laughs behind his thin mask and swoops the sage seeking a sharp contrast to the self inflictions. It is not completely understood other than to say that he, like a bandit, was also seeking. For shrike, the voice came through flights of freedom. Beneath that wintered desert, reality fell all too readily, unnerving. No words were spoken and the quiet lingered like a softly brushed breeze or a whispered kiss.

Shrike glanced across the arid landscape. The vastness of this place is a sanctity of peace where only the solitary mind might challenge everything that means anything.Though our planet suffers, our actions take for granted where only the trivial days hold merit for thought. It is the space within a monotonous mind that requires a bend like molten steel shaped from the blacksmith’s hand. These details are the unexplained foundation of who we’ve become like the shrike where routine tasks are survival.

The lost voice of this man balled up with a longing, thrashing wildly inside while the placid element of time passed, rippled across the surface of circumstance. There was no touch but the metaphors that slide in and out of meaning. A ragged travesty of love that took shape under a dark night where the moon had not yet found its balance. But the vision of the man dwindled too long in the heart and the time of his reason consumed with the daily chore of making pockets happy.

One day, footsteps forgot themselves in the stairwell. While mountainous calderas surround the plain, cavernous places scar. They come from too many years with only the abrasive touch of time. Worn in place, some might say.

There is nothing wrong. Everything has a reason. Everything is an action of some other force. Humans are only cast to the greater theater. Integral, and then again, not really. Without love, this is where they go; a place of irrelevance and insignificant truth, a mannequin for the dresser to fit.

To love is to bathe with bliss like warm water. It touches the skin and tingles the mind.  But there is a cruel dichotomy; an unforgiving nature when intentions are misaligned by any means. It forces some to forget and turn toward the running dogma to justify and rationalize their complacency like the lone shadow that lives in the bosom of her arid climate.

He sits talking to himself. He loved her with all his might – like a shooting comet hurling through the universe. As the desert floor moves, it is clear that life holds no abundant guarantees for a lonely dreamer. The dreamer needs his love as paint requires the canvas. Love is like a dream where the thought of her skin presses like a brand, only to slip away. Pure joy flashes with anguish and paralysis grips the tongue. Only memories are allowed to drift along the desert; a hitch hiker rolls like a tumble weed where the future is bound to the past whence the roots snapped.

She was a ghost that slipped into the earth when he glanced the other way.

Published by darren thompson

hello invisible people, I have lived well and continue to live well enough. I hope the same for you. Writing during a pandemic with catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, economic collapse, political strife, and toxic air means one tends to be pretty sedentary. I am reminded of our last trip to Cartagena, Colombia and the gang of sloths hanging out in the trees. Funny, I don't think sloths are ever behind schedule though. The book, FALLEN, is near completion. I know I've said this before, but I am definitely in the final lap with it. Though, I have not settled on the publishing or marketing of it, yet. I am not even sure how I will use this website. Admittedly, I've been writing on this bit for the better part of ten years. My mind has been wrapped around some weird urban sci-fi-fantasy junk. Feels like a twisted premonition of what is happening today. On another creative front, I am setting up a new website called: vomitpages.com which I am kind of excited about. These are writings and ramblings and musings of life when I am out of the flow with writer's block. There projects within projects there. Oh, I live in the Columbia River Gorge of the PACIFIC NORTHWEST. My characters are way more interesting. thanks.

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