The Work

I've lived in it all my life - the self's grand fiction - refuge for the child, youths rebel fortress and a walled cloister to house the holy relics gathered on the pilgrimages of my mind. I have built it line by line with words baked into bricks. Rooms follow years down passageways of books, dusty manuscripts and dreams hung in stations along age blackened walls. In high towers, windows open to a universe with a terrifying silence at its core. I hear reality's hard fist knocking at the door, a presence breathing its corrosive damp into mortar, unpicking me brick by brick. And yet, a sense of peace in surrendering what was never really there, dissolving into what is