It's all in your Head

Perplexity has befallen a catharsis longed for,
Trapped in a quick sand that ascends what I know as time,
as that sand descends into a slowing heart.
I walk atop a prayer, where a chosen lantern
is the only thing keeping away my familiar beasts of brimstone.

Onward goes the journey like the pulse that
only with a limit beyond my comprehension,
allows that sand to be as quick as its own will allows,
what with the mind of its own, like some sentient
being of my imagination, planted like a seed by an old devil on a shoulder.

I recall that voice, the sound of my own,
crying out to me from a dark corner in the back of my psyche,
hunched over and wretched in the lacking of light,
seeing only the walls of its cave by Plato,
and the vapor of its troubled breath scoffing at the shadow of hope.

The lantern does well by all means,
yet my heart has become slow and hesitant by the wounds
of its labor, just as these feet, though young have
seen so much and are numb to adventure. I tread now,
the lands of chance grown up as a shifting maze.

Familiarity abandons me with every turn,
but all to test me has somehow kept hope alive
inside that lantern. Here is the adventure that whispers so faintly,
but so that my attention is further grasped,
taking the formless hope and gifting potential as is needed to form it.

The voice is choking on that old seed of an old devil,
as my eyes no longer squint in the presence of darkness,
but do so because my smile is pushing their baggage upward,
brightening that lantern with so glorious a strength
that the darkness is thereby destroyed.

Perplexity has befallen the will of my
familiar beasts of brimstone as my hands toss the sand
like salt over my shoulder. Those sands were illusive,
as was the toil of my psyche, now that my eyes look
only onward by my choice of perspective atop a prayer which I walk.