Apocalyptic emptiness

....these fleeting thoughts as I pass through the end of one stage and turn

there is awareness over how voices I’ve listened to before were harmful. They wanted things from me as they opened their hands and offered me their veiled gifts

I see I have turned the corner and learned how to keep going on calloused soled feet that gained their rites of passage at last

they will no longer chain me down

I walked away at last

      I didn’t know I had instilled the callus as shield with the rubber exterior that bounces and deflects what once I had no defense against.... oh those flesh eating parasites.... goodbye. I don’t care anymore. No I’m not an asshole, I’ve just gone hard inside from the callus of experiences of a journey you will never know. If that makes me cold, so be it, but the world was always cold on this path when faces sneered and turned away in narrow judgement

I find warmth in places I’d never have expected .... New York which once had been my punisher comes now to rescue me as if the ghost of my father carries me to his historical monument. I stand at his statue on this city’s street and humble myself at his feet knowing awe stumbling to it by sheer accident.... my father

“What is it?” Nigel asks me as I watch absently squirrels gathering their acorns. Sit on the wood floor with legs up against me, my head against the wall. “You’re so quiet these last few days...”

His hands run up my arms as he sits behind me. He pulls me to him sitting behind me

“I think that I realize now that identity.... is a riddle about the measure of being different.... and I don’t know why the relevance of this has left me so empty lately. The shift of meaning seems to appear to me more about the emotions that drive us; the desperate ones.... What is voice, Nigel? When I can only whisper?”