Quest

Playing Cat & Mouse

Photo by Components AI on Unsplash

Searching for you
Through dreams anew,
Through fantasies, reflections too,
Or all those tangled points of view —

Your quest knows never any truce.
What a paradox, what irony,
At times to ignore you, carelessly,
Save for a glance, ghostly, ectoplasmic...

The chimeras that belong to us,
That tease, that itch, that make a fuss,
In moments flavored,
In moments fearful, disfavored…
To resist them — the daily fight.
A misstep reached with such delight.
To yield, then drown in guilt once more —

The count of wins? I lost that score.
Only the weight of failure now defines my core.
Is it a half-full glass I drain?
Or nihilism’s hollowed pain?

Optimism — to others, a thought obscene,
When it lights a well in a depression deep and mean.
And what to say, on the other side,
Of the armless man who tickles to laugh, in foolish pride...

I think within us dwell many forms,
Attracted by the opposite storms,
The urge to grasp what can’t be ours,
A deviance that hides, yet towers.

A balance, the quest for an answer —
The only key I have to offer.
As if entrusting an outer force,
To spare the mind from twisting course.
Beings of singular simplicity,
Amid complex synaptic electricity.
To search, to dig from within a pillar,
The one we’d almost joyfully shatter.

A word, a soul, a note, a hue —
It’s always you, in fine, I’m reaching through:
You, that muse with no true name,
But thankless inspiration, all the same.