The Middle Distance

“Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn, travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically.” --James Joyce, Ulysses
Waking up with the sunrise
Running fast enough to the west
Forever fallow your shadow
Never allowing it to shorten
It’s a youth without ever ending
It’s a death with nothing to show
Just a life spent negating
Screaming no, no, not what I wanted at all
In between the two letters
The firsts in the alphabet
Navigating the expanse
Separating them on a map
Is a swamp covered over in water
Overgrown over sediment
That’ll bury a traveller
Sinking slow slow slow till it’s all overhead
Down down down
So we fight to flee towards the lives that we wanted
Leave behind all the murdered air
Then find we aren’t what we were when we started
Lost, old, removed from the things we once cared
How those years start to weigh
How the reflexes slow
How the passionate days
Grow increasingly dull
There is so much to say
When the tide is out low
But it is trite it is vain
When the moon starts to pull
There’s a space in the seam between hate sewn to love
And I know what it means to live in the undone
When you’ve stopped your retreat but you’re unsure at what
You want to re-raise your gun
If you should re-raise your gun
I’ve been lost in between all the gaps separating the atoms
I’ve been trapped in the billboard fonts lining the highways
All I want is the middle distance
Where the solids have definition
To risk defeat find meaning without just running away