Soliquy for Solitude

I so often crave
What I seek to escape,
Meaningless noise 
And meaningful silence. 
I find desire
In place of success,
All these new toys
Bring no fulfillment.

We are alone,
So isolated;
All individual 
Islands;
Awash in a sea
Of meaningless noise
And meaningful silence
Sending out signals –
Lost, adrift
In the gale
And the maelstrom 
Of empty enjoyment.

The endless expanses
Have separated us
Severed all ties
From reality
And each other
And replaced
Humanity
With a mere illusion 
Simulacrum
Existing in solitary
Confined cells 
With walls
Built from portraits
In relief.
Statuesque,
Perfect,
Beautiful 
Falsehoods;
Grotesque,
Disgusting,
Ugly
Caricatures;
Hyperbolic features
Of moral equivalence 
Performed by strangers
Frozen,
As if in stone,
Forever. 

Yet time too
Will wash away
These strange
Exaggerations 
As the wind
And the waves
Crash on our shores
Eroding the beach
Revealing the stone
Its cold hard surface
Itself beaten
Cracking,
And porous.
This prison
Comprised
Of marble
Figures
Will crumble 
Like the cities of Rome
As wear
Destroys the varnish
And the statue
Is reduced to rubble.

We talk
No longer
To the voices in our head,
We converse with 
A poor imitation.
We stare at a mirror
And see no reflection.

And still I find myself
Sending up signals
And waiting for responses –
Watching for smoke
Over the horizon
In hope that 
Someone out there
Is enjoying their solitude
While seeking to
End it.
Still I slide
Notes
Through the bars of my window
Too high to see out of
And hope
There is an outside world
Left to read them.

I scream 
And cry out
Desperate
“I am here! Can you hear me?”
But the response comes
Only from
The shrieking
Of banshees wandering the wilderness.
The lost
Mothers
Mourning
Lost
Children
One of which I am;
One of many phantoms
Which will never again
Experience 
The life they once lived 
Or a comforting embrace
For such spirits 
Cannot touch
One another.

And so 
We explore
This Limbo,
An afterlife
Of emptiness 
Pregnant with
Melancholy
Birthing new sorrows.
Yet an artificial god
Connects us all
With lies
And fills us with
Distrust.

No longer will
I see 
Another
Real person
Because I 
Have myself
Ceased to be real
And have taken up
The mantle which I have been handed.

And so I perform
For an audience of none
And wish
I could see
The performance.