2013 Tunnels

People say these things cheaply.
'Til the wheels come off...'  
'Til the bitter end.'
'Failure is not an option.'


But do you know how far you have to actually go until the wheels are rocking on their spindles, wobbling??

Until things have gone from irksome to challenging to frustrating to enraging and then passed into listless bored waiting and then been jerked back and forth with hope and doom and then gone back into 'irons' and passed beyond bleak resignation into some gray no-space of nothing...

Some place, without gravity...  
when the tank has run empty and you're coasting, 
just coasting through the fog and you really don't know if it's going to work
or if somewhere up ahead, 
somewhere soon, 
it's going to roll to a stop. 

The end is not bitter. 
Not for the pioneer. 
The end is just a mathematical arrival 
when the resources have been exhausted before the destination is reached. 
The end is an option. 
The end is a quiet silence and a sigh. 
And if you have pushed hard enough and far enough, 
it is a sweetness, 
Not bitter, but longed for. 

Failure is the ever-present, easy-way-out. 
Failure is also something you can find at the top of the climb, 
at the end of the journey, when you're almost there, 
Failure is as arbitrary as success. 
Failure is the vulture wheeling over the herd 
that will get his meal either way. 

 This is not to complain.


This is simply to say I woke up while running along the naviglio 
and realized I was long past the end of my rope. 
That I had felt my limits reached and pushed through
repeatedly
and I couldn't see myself doing it for much longer.
I reached down inside me for the clamp, 
the switch that would compartmentalize it all
buy me a few more months... weeks, even... 
but there was nothing left to grab. 
Just a hollow empty place, quiet and dusty
and utterly used up. 
I could see both the light at the end of the tunnel, 
and feel the fuel gauge of spirit bouncing on empty.
Just rolling for as long as the momentum kept up.
Either way it would be over soon, and that was a relief 
to soothe the anxiousness that is the handmaiden of hope.


And all that was three months gone 
and still we crawl 
towards the Light