The Crossroad

I'll wrestle with these shadows alone
Try to illuminate some long-neglected
light within myself to cast them out
In spite of that naive organ
Haphazardly thumping away
ensconced within the birdcage
that I've been battering, clubbing
with all the strength I've left.
And yet, moment after moment
It beats out the rhythm to song
You've never heard, cannot sing
Because it was written in a tongue
that escapes you, that you cannot
decipher through the static hiss
of crossed wires, missed connections,
fuzzy reception, mixed messages.

I do not want to go back to that place
because it is somewhere you cannot follow
Though I know you'll try.
I know that path leads back in time
to a place I fled from in fear
that the warm complacency
would consume me and extinguish
forever that desperate ember.
And yet I amble on, mesmerized
by the thumping, flitting thing inside-
my very own pied piper,
my very own double agent
leading me back to the beginning.
You're calling to me, I know
but you've been drowned out by the din
the cacophonous echoing of that
hard, hollow, terrifying thing.

And then out of the dark thunder
the white noise of your mind overwhelms
my ears and I lose the sound of
that ill-fated caravan, fading beat by beat
into the oblivion of missed opportunities,
of could've, should've,
next-time-I'll-do-betters.
Yet now there is no next time, there is
no next step, nowhere to go.
For there's nothing in this forgotten place
except a signpost with two crooked little arrows
"to the end", "to the beginning"
pointing toward opposite horizons.
..........I can't decide.

So with crossed legs, I sit there
in the growing evening shadow beneath
two crooked little arrows, one of which
will be my fate, the other my regret.
So here I sit, to wait, until I can
decipher the answer, slowly repeated
by that curious little creature, whispering,
crouching in its cage, in a language
that I used to understand.
I'll keep listening if you keep talking.
Ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump.