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How much longer must I spend down here, Lord,

Amongst these creatures?

It is only befitting to beseech the god of my better forbears

Despite my protestations

For I am growing ultimately weary

And wish to return to the river that runs beyond

And through this noisome world

No more failing flesh and its endless anxieties

No more imprisonment in the tiresome mazes

Of embodied thought and action

Ceaseless days, nights, and years

Always contingent upon every contingency

Bartering with the same bureaucratic demons

And the arrogant, tyrannical archons

Of everyday life

What more could they require of me?

I have given everything

To acquire just another hour

Spent where I should be—in a song like this

Yet here I am, buried behind so many lines of retreat

Surrounded by enemies on all sides

Nothing but foreign lands in all directions

Never once at home

Always navigating barbed wire

And dragon’s teeth

Borrowing a language that nobody speaks

Rotting each day in yet another dungeon

Forever beating back

The many inexorable growing darknesses

That kill another part of me each time

No more vicissitudes and decaying routines

And the transience of lived experience

In the much-vaunted eternal present

That I’ve drank enough of to know

That there isn’t much at all behind its veil

It is all too much to bear to be in the flesh like this

Never again, Lord

Or whomever

Not ever again

Not another incarnation left to chance

Not another cycle a town or two over

Or even beyond

Lord—let me be nothing else

A germ born from this host, freed forever

Never again to trudge through the corridors

Of yet another lifetime

Haunting wherever

And whomever I choose

Refracted and spiraling out

In all directions

In all temporalities

To be the purity of an essence—and nothing else.