The Covenant Of Understanding by slynnknight at Inkitt

The Covenant of Understanding

Since the arrival of my third personification

I’ve thought it best

to keep a close watch on myself,

calling upon my third eye, the observer

I coax its emergence

from behind a thinning mask

of social veneers,

calcified by falsehoods and distractions

finally scuffed away

by the uncontrollable events I’m bound to.

The scales tilt then fall,

unearthing carcasses long buried

beneath repressed debris

clawing at two-way mirrors

on dead end streets —

I’m here, sifting through mountains of psychic riffraff

burrowing down to covert oddities, strange instincts

like a lab rat I’m caught in it — this maze of crazy

where past and present collide,

pressurized between fear and hope

obsessively looking for diamonds

inside old defeats, those hidden

in crevices of mundane moments

between the rocks and even harder places.

in broad daylight, uncharacteristic of me

I catch myself scanning shelves

displaying tabloid magazines and bubblegum

malingering in grocery store checkout lines

resisting the urge to buy them both,

run from the store

making my sugary escape

into the lives of the notoriously ordinary

made garish by the bell jar of fame,

pouring over strangeness,

wagging my head in mock shock

even as I engage in my strange new habit

of collecting plastic bottle caps in red, green and blue

haunted by those I know others must dutifully discard

without thought to a life of new purpose,

even as I’m unsure what I’ll do with my caps—

anticipating the act of transformation,

I commit to it with a sense of urgent obsession

as the hoarded bag of plastic gems

grows plump with expectation

a crafty doormat, perhaps?

something to wipe the world off my feet

before stepping back in time

I’d better get glue, I’ll need glue

to keep it all together —

These new idiosyncrasies and eccentricities

manifest alongside the receding parts of my mother.

Paralleling loss with nonsense and odd consequence

Hoarding things rather than experiences

in reality’s harsh light both mean clinging

to impermanence, both mean heartache.

My tenuous capacity for reason

longs to take flight with hers

I watch her gaze glide

over unseen valleys and outcrops

as a stream flows over bedrock

occasionally fixing her blue eyes on objects

or places I cannot see,

remembered artifacts and carvings

etched not into gray matter

but deep into the expanse of her heart

for me, on this side of the mountian

there is only the vacuum of absence

when she floats away like this

I use the still familiar timbre of my voice

to pull her back before she drifts

too far from shore

I need her to stand a little while longer

upon the crumbling bedrock

of yesterday’s reality where she knows me

as one who still belongs to her

III

Few experiences in life relinquish their mastery

to the covenant of understanding

between heart and mind.

Even the empathic eye of the poet,

though valiantly preening and pushing

to stretch syntactical meaning

over frame and meter,

taking notes and thoughts to task

with or without the aid of rhyme,

she may not rely on it — the covenant of understanding

each new stanza complete,

the poem, is but a stingy reward

for plumbing the depths of defiant mysteries

leaving her to realize the covenant

is no promise at all, rather

it’s random, accidental at best —

barren and unyielding to soliloquies

of the heart in reason or in jest.