We must try again

I must tell you!
Somehow I must say:
The way the days and nights linger.
The darkness outside and inside.
The shadows on my bedroom wall.
The blue light that stares me in the eye.
And how my feet carry me without my asking or thinking,
How the road races beneath me and my eye flies away,
How the silence is always waiting just outside,
And if the noises bother me, it weighs, but I can tell one Devil from another.

The world is not a place anymore.
It is a series of images cast on my eyes,
Sounds that assault the ears,
There is only me and where I go.
Wherever you go, there you are,
And here I am, everywhere I go.
To go where you are not,
You must be who you are not.
This I know how to do, and I seek it,
And the waiting weighs too.

I remember a time when the mists hid things,
When beyond every wall there stretched a cavernous expanse,
When the glass and steel cathedrals of my dreams hung majestically about me, just out of sight.
But now every wall is a wall,
And beyond the wall, nothing.
Philosophers ask: What is there at the edge of the world?
A sheet of drywall and two coats of eggshell.

And I remember the first wall, and the terror.
Atop a hill, with the air hot and dry, the trees dead, the branches bare,
I looked up.
No clouds, no sun, no birds, no roof.
No shelter.
Blue and blank.
I saw the wall and the nothing beyond.
My heart stopped,
My youth died.
For a while I held on.
I thought of the damp, dim places,
The mists, the vines, the echoing tunnel.
And on an overcast day I can still believe.
But a second day came, when the wall found me again.
This one is inside and outside and all around.
It is the wall that is not a wall.
It is everything.

Some live in a world made of persons,
And some in a world of places.
I live in a world made of walls,
The emptiness behind them,
And the emptiness between.