Columns Dark

-Columns Dark-
by
Keaton Foster

“Shoulder to shoulder, the darkness stands.”

Above this very head, much shame, wedged. In a space confined, in a prison enshrined. No one can go, no one ever has been but me. In that place, in that space, all that I’ve done is kept. A close reminder of the serious nature of how I’ve remained when so many others have not. As far as I go, as much as I escape, as always I’m right there. Close.

Much pain does indeed flood this saturated heart. Gaping are the holes, the ones torn into the fabric of this very soul. Faith cannot save me, and the truest of God will never be able to redeem me. This tragic being that is the real me is woven together with strings, fabrics, and pieces of regret. By themselves, some of the regrets are seemingly frivolous, but combined they are everything that makes who I am and what I’ve done so damn serious.

I’m here alive, suffering not to be. I’m afraid of what’s to come, but I’m more afraid of what remains. This very life is God’s way of lending me time, more than most, to comprehend. At least, that is what I believe. One of the only things I believe. To a man like me, such retrospection is a deity unto itself. Such a chance, such potent ideas, do not come along often. Wise, of course, are God’s choices, but for those of us living them, such choices at times seem obtuse and aberrant. I can only hope that he knows what he’s doing with me and within my life.

Under these feet, there are broken rocks, shattered pieces of what once stood. Intricate temples with once blessed vestibules. The very entrances to both this mind and this soul. Portals to a preponderance of unimaginable ideas. Expression-meant temples to ultimately be dismantled and not destroyed. But now they are gone, devastated, barren, and wasted. Taken away before their time.

Such shattered pieces are causing me to bleed, hemorrhaging nonsensical words that few will understand. Such destruction has forced me to rebuild what was once pure and mutate it into something often idealistically impure. Most out there, the ones who read me, they are not oblivious but just occupied ignoramuses with a lot on their minds. I don’t blame them, what good would that do? I was once so sure that building such monuments to myself was a reasonable idea, and of that, it turns out I was quite wrong.

Columns dark, nothing white, nothing pure. Rotten, I fear, has become this very core. Blackened is my soul, what an empty hole. From it, nothing does or will ever grow. Consuming the world before these eyes. Little by little, those who loved me have fallen out of view. Increasingly blind is the man who has nothing further to believe about himself or anything else. He does not see the truth; he no longer sees the lies. In between, in a place of nothing, in a forsaken kingdom of made-up methods of denial, he has come to reside. That is where I am, not where I was meant.

Lesser and lesser does living seem. What I’m doing here, now, in this place, is something else. Existing is more than a beating heart or a thinking brain; existing is about being here when being here is what was intended least of all. Truly existing is above surviving all that life deals us. Those few critical life events, the ones that change us in ways of both scope and detail, those events and how we react to them are, of course, paramount.

We must be living the best that we can as we slowly die in such terrible ways. I am at odds with myself and the dismantled temples once built by these gifted hands.

And more and more, I know that nothing stands as it once did, nor will it ever again…


Columns Dark
by Keaton Foster Copyright © 2015