Before Sunset

God’s fingers brushed another stroke to this masterpiece, as last night I felt a turning, a changing of the taste in the very air. Night was falling soon, and everyone could feel it’s crisp, secretive breath coming to hide away the magnificent canvas of resplendent existence. Solemn beauty, bathed in twilight, waves to greet me as I drive past, barely able to notice as I dodge traffic on the freeway, consumed by the passing and merging, deafened by the hurried scrapes of rats’ feet all around me. My music and my art, were the clanking of industry and green lines traced into dollar signs, when it occurred to me in a moment that I had never and would never attain a complete experience of these, my twisted modern muses, whose wine could never give me satisfaction.
It was in these final seconds of the day, when all the earth is gilded by the soft touch of Helios’ farewell, that I understood I didn’t need that enlightenment, nor the visions it accorded. The falling of darkness would be as a downy blanket gathered around me, like a child cocooned and ready for a bedtime story. Let it come, I say for the first time, let the waves of impotent waking action wash away as the moon turns its face to frighten away the tides; let sun’s skewed perspective fall away, and peel off the stifling ceiling of a fool’s blue sky that I may see from the remotest corner what infinity resembles, staring as the prophets did into a million twinkling eyes of God, daring to wonder what glorious stars may burn behind my own eyes.
This bleak spontaneity, this lacking reliability on the part of my scarce-appearing epiphany, makes me savor its presence all the more. Such a rare thing to feel, to observe from beginning to end with complete awareness, is the process of awakening. I love it, I long for it day and night; it is my religion and deity. It is what I pray to, and desire with all faith and sincerity to become one with. But this I fear I may never do, for it would be an awakening into a dream, too much like heaven for me to absolutely be walking on the earth. Would I abandon reality, or it me? Or perhaps, would such an apotheosis truly grant to its fledgling deity a godlike control of its world? Fitful is my sleeping, and gradual my awakening, but look and see already the powers I have come into. A millennium passed, and this god has learned to fly! Are we not impressed?
It can only be a matter of time, before we, too, turn the wheels of the earth and sun, holding together the spinning and floating threads of gravity, shaping cleverly the systems of a new universe. Can you not see it beginning to form, even now, dispersed in the ether between your mind and mine? Your eyes are passing over its bricks and mortar, your head giving life and law to its gasping continuum as imagination opens the way to itself, removing from your brave steed its blinders and giving it a firm, encouraging slap on the flank to start you on your way. Ride freely and breathe deep the verses a mad young god utters; twitch not your hands to the reigns, for here they serve no purpose. Pay no mind to hindrances in this land where none exist, until your thought gives it birth and forges locks without keys, which, once given shape, a god only can undo. Without you, this world cannot exist, and without your consent it cannot turn.

This is our one word, our singular poem, the indivisible prose of our universe, which I am whispering eternally.