8/3/10

Longing
By Matthew Vincent Nardozza


I crave a touch I have never known; I feel it in the depths of my dreams; I feel it like a strange echo before the sound; vague outlines, silhouettes, and shadows seen before the object - and its teasing images and my own fictional perceptions only redouble my cravings! What, then, am I to do?

I dream of things unknown to me; my mind makes something of them, and I feel them. But I know they are but thin-veiled ghosts of truth; wispy shadows the mind weaves into visages of demons in the night. Their false visions make me hunger for their truths. A thousand illusions - a million petty dreams that cannot possibly compare to one vibrant truth!


Ah, the soul yearns for it!
Longing for the barley known...


Moth to a flame; my soul flies to what I dare not touch.

Thanks, then, that the flame is but a thin reflection; what force, what effect, should that flame have upon my soul, should it be reached? Am I truly held back by the shutters? Or, of my own, deep-seated fears, hidden from even myself, do I hold the shutters shut?

Does my own fear tether me to the known? To the commonplace; the comfortable? Is my chassis held to the cliff by a rope, or is it only my own hand that fixes me to the wall?


Oh, damnable emotion!
Detestable Humanity!


Tormented by dreams of slivers of things truly foreign, and held by bindings to which I hold the key! What then, what holds me here? Is it that damnable fiend, Fear? Is it another of Pandora's associates? Cruel, cruel is Fate!

Fate what has granted my snippets of such beauty, yet what tears them from me with such malice! What demons torment me with their images of feats and their icons of rest, while they pierce my flesh with their spears and feed me only dust.

To long... to long is to be human. But to know of these things, and yet be held so far from them...! I would that I had never known of their existence.

What I would do, in my eternal moments of torment, for a single sip of that secret Ambrosia. What sins I would gladly commit, what spears I would gladly throw myself upon, for a single touch. A caress; a single intimate gesture - the sensation of flesh upon my own, gentle and warm; of another's fingertips against my own, of crimson lips parted not in speech, but in ecstasy.

Keep, then, the soul. Keep the mind; keep the deep knowledge of worldly things. Keep the depth beyond the eyes. I crave only the flesh, only the deep physical truth of carnal love.


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Matthew Vincent Nardozza is a previously unpublished author and a student of Environmental Science, with a literary bent.