On the Time That Is Not

Your solitude breathes and pulses.
All space is in motion.
Oh, how you wish to hold and claim everything!
“Now I understand” or “Again all is lost” —
Futile attempts to stop the impossible.

How you wish to flee!
Immediately, into any form.
And so you shout through tears: “I am strong, I will manage!”
A new identity built on loss.

Or perhaps — not heroism, but simply being within the rupture?
Let the body shake. Let words fail to come.
And let the plan wait for you as a future that does not exist.

Hold your attention on what collapses.
No guarantees. No possibilities.
You have woken into this viscosity forever.

You see everything again, you, the operator.
How you run not fast enough to escape.
And do not stop long enough to hold.
You wish to invent a name and make a diagnosis.
Something to hold onto in this falling.

Why do you need these words — “bad,” “stuck,” “must be solved”?
For such is the structure of solitude.
Dwelling within the between.

Now you come to know the ocean and its waves.
Today paradise, tomorrow hell.
Postponing understanding, seeking a cause.
But is there a cause?

In the morning you are human, at noon a hungry ghost.
In the evening — transformative solitude.
And at night you become an animal.
Movement exists, but nothing changes.
Oh, how you wish for stability and causes!
Your dreams of “normality” —
Not life, but its illusion.

Drift among these rooms of suffering diffused across the horizontal plane.
And notice all as it is — here is the wave.
The quiet background to which you are bound.
And when something is not right —
Laugh at every cause.
Having seen, do not turn away.
Do not ignore the rare acknowledgement of your clear-seeing.

Hold it, not for one second, but for two.
You are not at the path’s beginning, but are again the path.
There is no line from bad to good.
Waves are not “progress” compared to the background.

There remains your effort of attention.
Configurations replacing each other.
There remains the place in space where you are.