The Path

The Shining Path © Pisces Iscariot 2006

Our heads are populated with sound – with voices and music; industry and destruction; memory and delusion.
Ahead the sky is obscured with the clouds and dust of tomorrow’s dawning.
The plateau over which the path now travels is littered with objectives and objections; trip hazards of ethical barbs; moral metaphysics and material madness; political subroutines; corruption’s codes of practice and the smell of decaying flesh.

This litter may or may not become problematic - tomorrow or even later today.
We can step around it or over it so long as we have some other goal; some source of fulfilment to lean on.

Perhaps tomorrow the path may rise above the plateau; follow the treacherous edge of some outcrop; some volcanic blade of euphoric dimension; giving forth a view so exquisite and illuminating as to quicken the beat of the mind’s ritual dance.

Alternately the path may enter some crevasse whose sides will exclude the view; a crevasse perhaps so deep that only the stars may be visible when looking up, a view of vast proportion and sobering weight.

But through all possibilities the background noise will abstract and distract:

The wolf at the door will keep telling us about the wolf at the door.
In the house of straw the walls will be decorated with celebrity enhanced gloss and shouting advertisements to placate the mind - a process that smells of piglet piss and puerile posturing. A bargain at half the price.
Huddled inside, Hansel & Gretel will drop aphorism from slack-minded mouths; confetti at the wedding of greed and control; lyrics from the hymn sheet of deception. The nuptial cake’s figurines will be etched in sugar-coated cliché to flatter history’s lies and to arm the righteous with nest-feathered futures and fragile soap pedestals with which to line the path; a façade behind which atrocities thrive.

Pandora left one thing in the box yet trapped.

The ignorant; the enlightened; ghosts of former selves; visionary engineers and futurist savants; idiots and idiosyncratic advocates of sunshine; daughters of darkness; card sharks and carpet salesmen; mystics, wife-beaters and rapist of all denominations; faith healers and gurus; witches and psychic palm readers; paedophiles and saints; the meek, the mild, the incurably romantic; the entangled; those with faces raised in blind faith; those with backs turned in abject despair; those with feet of clay or heads in the clouds; you, me, the Taliban, the free – all will tread this path, all wearing shoes fashioned of hope.