A prose poem
Fall accelerating, tumbling stopped, headfirst pell-mell into strengthening darkness…no clue what is being dived through…
Walls, rough rock you speed past in a blur, fingernails torn, bloody, blazing pain, useless…deceleration long since out of reach.
All the years of stepping on or over cracks, you really were falling through… illusion of solid ground obliterated by earthquakes…all falls merge into lifelong descent toward Hades, far beyond…
Countless breaks in surfaces expand fractally, branch out, destroy structure, form falls into ruin…you don’t know it is happening until ground falls away beneath your feet, or sky falls upon you….
Mom not telling any of us she is signing away custody, idyllic summer crumbling into September, different home, different school, no friends…getting molested by loving family in cellar for years…first lover writes she now is paramour of British organ player twice her age…wife says if you first met each other now you probably would not even like each other…mother dies trapped at bottom of Bahamian cistern, liquefying remains discovered weeks later…father snarks he loves you as though you were his own son when you always thought you were…brother dies of heart attack in forties…sister drowns herself in booze and pills…nephew smashes bullet through his brain…wife diagnosed with rare deadly mucosal melanoma…
Those are just personal; the cracking, crumbling, falling is so much larger, huge, world-wide at least.
You realize your privileged life is built on backs and blood of slaves, chattel, children, indigenes, over centuries and more…electronically you witness starvation of babies, facilitated by your country…tornados, fires, rip apart and incinerate lives across continents…tsunamis sweep everything away…women viewed, treated as somehow less than people…world climate grows murderous for future generations, could have been prevented…protests, tearing of hair, gnashing of teeth avail nothing…willful ignorance is pandemic, hundreds of thousands die needlessly…policeman turns rabid…so much more horribly horribly wrong…
All while you push the dread away, carry on, build a life for self, family on pretenses, oblivious to entropy, build career on underpaid life of service, grow old, whistle in the dark at mortality despite evidence of countless losses…
Too tired to pretend or be terrified anymore, you find a piece of self believes it’s worth it…remember love and joy across generations…people you’ve helped, people who helped you…mystic sexual union catapulting spirit…worship gods, build bridges to ancestors…solidarity with activists marching…wife loves and cares and hugs you every day year after year after year…mighty dancing, singing, speaking words of power, human connection…know how tiny you are yet rooted in earth, reaching for sky…out of breath on mountain top, part of natural world…see children born, grow, love…people selflessly help people through pandemic…habitats for humanity…speak truth to power…connect with that so incomprehensibly greater than human aspiration…marry barefoot on hill on island under blazing sun…limitless joy…
All of it illusion? Hope illusory? Despair illusory? Have to wonder are we falling up, perspective distorted? Are we headed for apex or bottomlessness? Is all this cracking crumbling falling away of facades making way for something else?
Let go of knowing which way we are falling. We won’t know until it’s over, probably not even then.
Float.
~ Wry Welwood
17th of December 2021
Written in response to Scrittura prompt: cracks.
Attention J.D. Harms.