Eternity

Eternity


My time arc, conscious arrow through eventuality,
looms eternal.
Day by day I am restricted through compulsion.
It is not about reason, knowing what must be done.
It is viscerally doing, compelled.  I must have
sanctuary from daylight.  Allowed freedom to roam
by night, I must hunt, kill, feed, be gone before dawn.
I do not sail forward through open time. Each day’s duality
experience propels by need foreordained.
I can go several nights without feeding.  The compulsion
metastases as my feeling of fitness and agency falls.
Every demi-cycle I must hide from Sun, even when that
light seems shielded by cloud, storm.
Eternity is my little joke with this planet on which my cycles depend.
I could die, again, forever? I don’t know what that would
mean.  Perhaps there is yet an after-death, a Hades or
re-entry into another form.  There are no guidebooks, no
authorities I am aware of.  I might think, reason, that I could
but forego heed of dawn and learn the truth.
I can’t.
I’ve tried.
My arrogant body takes me to shelter without my will’s
command.  Is free will no longer mine, a forfeit to eternity?
Was my will, any of me, ever free?  Would I have found
my way to freedom had I been allowed to grow to maturity?
Children are not allowed to be free.  They must be owned
by guardians, or left to predations of fate out of sight or custody.
Children may resist with all their will, and always lose.
This world is not about kind lessons, patient mentors offering
sweet bits to satisfy, nourish, energize.  Rather, mortality
appears a series of adjusting footing or getting trampled.
I can not be envious of them.
I track a potential suicide this dark and stormy night,
onto a bridge over the river.  No one has cared to notice
his erratic signals of desperate desire but me.  He is just
another man that no one will miss.
I save him from uncertainties of drowning.  We engage in
mutually satisfactory transaction.  Perhaps his consciousness
goes forward to its next adventure.  I take care to assure
his afterlife is not my responsibility.  I separate his head and
telltale punctured neck from what falls into the river.
The dead man’s head I carry further out toward sea, carrion
for scavengers.  Soon pre-dawn compulsion insists the end
to this night’s part.  No point to crossing off another day
of a sentence with no end.