Some Personal Darkness

 
I have a world of my own. Pure black, dark.
All the blackness, all the shame of that world belongs to me alone.
With my share of what I own, I draw kohl around my eyes
and fall asleep deep into the night.

The four walls of my solitary world are coated thick with deep blue.
They say the color of sorrow is blue. Today I think so too.

I have my very own waterfall.
From its torn body, rebel fountains of salt water
carry my circle far, far away.

I have my own desert.
Right in the center of that vast wasteland I live, unmoved.
Within its thousand miles, not a single human soul.

I have a lonely coral island.
Across its enormous chest grow heaps and heaps of fresh sorrow.
I alone am its inheritor; the island has no tenant farmers.

I have a very secret, solitary dark night.
Throughout that night, countless griefs and longings wrapped in loneliness's shawl.
All the hours of my not-having I keep there.

I have a personal you.
To find you I have been in meditation for lifetimes.
Despite all this, even now I haven't been able to have you as my own.

The world now feels like a prison to me.
This end to that end...whichever end I go to, I see everyone
having to pay the debt of birth by digesting all the shame of staying alive.

From birth until this day I have only remained living,
never truly lived.

Once I wanted to grasp sorrow with both hands and swallow it whole.
Then I saw that sorrow had already devoured me long ago, I never felt it happen.

Inside me there is someone writhing in pain.
No one has ever looked after him, not even I.