FALLING EVER FURTHER MORE DEEPLY AWAY    (12-13-1995, 3:36a.m., Galveston Island, Texas)

   
   
i stay up all night at times    
perhaps to steal back time    
that i feel is being stolen away from me    
i stay up in my head    
keeping watch from my inner battlements    
looking for the shadow of death    
breathlessly lurking all about me here    
across and throughout each long night    
concealed in invisible layers of so much    
mysterious deadly craftiness    
stealthily stealing ever closer to me    
all the time  day and night    
it knows i watch in wait for it    
as even here now    
i listen for the clacking    
of it s sneaking bones    
trying to slip in    
when all the rustling leaves outside themselves    
have successfully just snuck past    
the slippery  luminous  passing moon    
when it too perhaps was only halfway listening    
or was it only me here again  
so stuck and lost inside my head  
covertly masked as these mystic    
nocturnal  haunting coastal winds  
blew by overhead outside tonight  
above me here  
and then right on into  
and through  
my hyper vigilant  
increasingly paranoid head  
way down here below  
not sleeping at all  
at this dark  still  late wee hour  
but then again    
perhaps the shadow of death    
has already found it s way inside  
both my home and head here now  
for as i feel the biting chill  
of the floor beneath me    
climbing slowly up  
through my feet and legs here now  
as these fleeing hours themselves  
mercurially slip by  
in unseen time  
upon and through  
this outer and inner coldness  
from icy tiles to skin  
until and when  
i find myself suddenly thinking    
maybe i m listening  too much  
much too closely  
for such signs  
much too closely  
to the air i m breathing in    
as it stuffs me here tonight  
like a handmade quilt    
yet still despite all that    
so numb i feel    
completely knocked off track    
derailed    
lost adrift across this night s    
vast  restless sea    
of wind blown hours    
stuck here trapped again    
so deeply encased within    
all this dreamless batting    
of recurrently restless    
sleepless  chronic insomnia    
now so long fallen from grace    
from life    
from my life    
as i once knew  loved    
and so passionately lived it    
yet now  at so long last    
already so sunken and fallen    
i seem to continue to    
only keep further and further    
ever more deeply keep  
watching and listening  
too closely to  
my ever diminishing  
increasingly failing  
long sickened life and being  
as i once knew and lived it  
now more than ever  
with not much of it  
or of me now left to lose  
nor to  have further diminished at all  
for now more rapidly than ever before  
i can feel inside my head  
my heart  my body  
my being  my bones  
now fast approaching  
inch by inch  
breath by breath  
the very edge  
of my human existence  
increasingly sinking and falling away  
at long last  
off into the dark  uncertain    
great mysterious  unknown abyss  
of that final  
end point  
time and place  
of ultimate slipping away  
of complete and total  
letting go  
into that transcendent  
great mystery s  
greatest  
great mystery itself  
of either letting go  
into absolute non existence  
or of eternal life itself  
and eternal peace  
along with it  
fully conscious  
fully awakened  
enlightened being  
of truth  love and light  
until that very moment  
might hopefully be  
found out  
and fully realized  
in truth  
to be
not my final
ending
but rather more
my true
beginning
now only
just
begun