want

the chest crumbles for want of beauty,
for the weight of yearns that go unheeded.

I slip my fingers along the fault lines,
along the knife points,
dull with late twists to the plot (scam) weaved
off a pile of days with no discernible
separations, like a wet pile of soggy phone books.

In each of us, an entire civilization,
hanging gardens of laxitude,
orbital cities of progress and science fiction,
banquets worth of Odin's visit
and lamentations that would put a
mendicant order out of business.

No, apocalypse does not come in a brutal burst.
Apocalypse is the tinned silence of the night,
day in day out,
- daily grind permitting -
realizing the futility of it all,
still untraceable in the face of the newborn,
yet fire-etched in each of us,
our brows,
weary.
We, encased in our echo chambers,
strapped fugitives,
counsellors to ourselves,
not always with the cleanest hands.

What remains at the end are the dregs
of what we could 've been, had we...

For want of beauty
we scourge the horizon, looking for perpetual motions,
to forget about ourselves,
- ultimate release -
and become a star with no name,
a simple rock away from our own reach.

The heavy weight of having
motives, reasons, emotions, thoughts
to reflect on sometimes seems like a practical joke-cum-punishment.

We've been had, cheated.
We never gained any enlightenment. We just were lost
in a place of shining lights.
And we pillaged whatever scraps we could get hold of
to build the beauty we wanted to have,
modelled after ourselves,
defective, dirty, dangerous, demeaning maybe,
the sense of dosing increasingly lost as the times accelerated.

The critical mass of a new dark age
is being gathered in our hearts, inevitably.

That too makes my chest crumble inwards.
What new beauty will be born out of that?