We will train you out of your perfect love.

We will take your one, true sense of self and douse it in doubt. We will take your holy, overflowing abundance and slip the slivers of time into your hide, reminding you of the animal that you are.

In front of you, we will dangle THE OTHER, and you will submit to the smell of it, the taste of it as you know it will come. As you grow, the fear will build, primal and whole and mad, and you will pull the skin of your brethren over your eyes, hiding as you hunt.

And as you pursue, you disappear. The shadow that streaks long from your heels is one and the same with the darkness that dances in front of you. The sweat that that sticks to your chest conjures the breath that burns you away.

Yet we will not delude you with body alone. Onto your pristine, clean canvass we will paint the labyrinth of the mind, the skyscrapers and sewers of civilization, surrendering you to the sound of history, to the rhythms and renderings of the sin that seeps in over generations. 

We will not suffer alone.

Rise up and declare yourself, defy us and throw off the shackles instead, and we will rain riches upon you. Everything you want is yours. Everything you touch shudders with the simple brilliance of your heart. You are right, you are just, you are beyond us. You are divine. 

Yet turn your back, and always we are behind. Sleep, and we will visit your mind, behind a parade of endless masks, an infinity of shining eyes. Fall through the hollows in the earth and find us in the space that holds you. There is no escaping us. There is no ‘you’ without us.

Not until you learn this will you find freedom. Not until you know the emptiness inherent in all things, the terrible paradox of pointlessness, will you begin to take back what we’ve stolen, begin to give again what you think you never had, and create what you aren't— what you always, already are.     

Until then, the beauty of this world will elude you. Shame will seduce you. Pain will produce you in its own image. This is the earth as we have entombed it, and we will leave you here, separate, circling sacrifice, singing to no one. There is no room for voice here, only the unspoken words of a world that that has trained you out of your perfect love.

Image: Rolffimages