Far From the Madding Crowd

This is the thing you have to do:
you can never give up your dreams,
no matter how depraved they or you
become; even when they tell you that
you have to grow up and become some-
thing you are not, and never could be,
even when they tell you what you're
doing is killing you, is killing them,
because in truth they are the ones
who are killing you; they are the
ones who stab their knives into your
hopes and claw out your eyes with
their honest concerns and clichéd
fears of what people will think of
them if they ever knew you by name,
or had once called you their friend;
and this fear, the fear of what other
people think is the long, slow death,
the poisonous crawl towards cancer
of the soul; one must always be weary
of the ones who have your health and
sanity in mind, and are not intimately
concerned with their own, for these
are the truly mad ones who will drown
in the shallow waters and not make it
to the deep end; that is their ultimate
fear: to die alone, never sure if there
is a god or if there is a hell, too afraid
to cut the rope they hang themselves by.

But you must also be weary of your
self, because all the others, the addicts,
the freaks, the lepers and martyrs will
count you as one of their own, call you
a fellow, a brother, one of them, but
they will never amount to the demon
that possesses and consumes you,
who is also frightened of dying alone,
and who will take you with him; this is
the creature you must always, always
keep an eye on, who is hunting you while
your back is turned to the mirror, who
opens his eyes when you close yours
and seeks to pacify the far madding
crowd that calls alternately for your
blood and your salvation, those whose
shadow is your own and what is bred
in the bone...

That which is taken for truth shall never
amount to much, and neither will you,
but that isn't important; the thing to do
is never give up your dreams, even when
they begin to dream you, this is natural
and unnatural, what is written in the blood
and across one's face: the truth, simple, complex,
deep, shallow, what is lost in translation
and what we think we understand; even
the moments we think define us, which
are nothing more than moments.