"PLACE" by Romel Martinez

PLACE

I see the bridge, sturdy and still, within the confines of its Gothic maze of darkness. I mourn on how secure it was - how confident, being who or what it was built for. The black, representing the endless abyss of certainty, covered the bridge to its foundation. Confident in the sense that it’s holding us all in place, doing its job, protecting us from the fall. Why couldn’t I have been that bridge. That immaterial thing which served its function like clockwork – aware of its place, respecting the order of things. My life held no fixed and rigid owners. There weren’t any foundations I could lean to – to make myself firm, held in place. There wasn’t certainty of my future which was like aquatic blue or perhaps purple as this prose. For I was engaged into reaching, investing, in frivolous pursuits, only gaining frugal results. Twenty-six years of place placed on a pedestal of desponded virility, tarnishing my youth into transgressional transitions of adulthood. There wasn’t a bridge to allay my constant inner turmoil of place – my purpose. Nothing to keep the endless multitude of forbearance from reaching the point of origin to my defecated destination. No security invested in the purchase of vibrant concrete; for all the soul vanished from within. A soul or a spirit that was never there to begin with – to digest myself, to reduce and rot for the constant malevolence of desire and negative thoughts. Bringing me down, drowning me in the sea of self-despair, riveted in the self-contained chamber without musical cadences dancing lovingly to the vast expanse of my heart. Because it was empty. Never held, firmly in place.