Like a gelded brumby, I fence-pace and spend long hours staring into the corner of this well-trodden mind.
I am captured and separated from my undomesticated kind.
Confined to this paddock while they gallop the land,
a highway of humans and metal passes me by like a stampeding band.
I hear the hills echoing the calls of my kin as they roam what was once my home.
Their ghosts blow by, looking back over the walls of my world, beckoning me—
begging me to break free from it all.
I reply with a cry for their help to regroup, but the wind cannot stay, and they have strayed far out of the way.
I am stripped down to my bones, in my being inside, akin to that brumby ripped out of the wild.
I starve with an insatiable desire for comfort, for home, while searching for satisfaction in my sire alone.
Erik Varden’s shattering of loneliness seems psychosis;
it is hopeless in this purgatory of pride.
I sit beside a table to commune with the divine.
My single vices remain with me wholly unbenign.
I yearn, I burn with this unholy thirst—
to be held, to be touched,
to sit in the company of another,
to be known and to know,
to be not alone.
I am a caged animal,
a mammal calling for a mate;
a wolf pacing a pen in perpetual shock.
There is no crack, no way back.
My pack has moved on.
I have no one to sit beside.
I cannot leave my bereavement.
The permanent agony of loss—
friends, family,
loved ones I have loved.
And those I long to love, I have lost.
This solitary confinement,
this cold, dark, empty abandonment,
eats away at my heart,
my mind, my whole being.
This is my crucifixion—
I hang here, nailed to this fate, contemplating fifty years more, alone, while onlookers watch me groan.
How can I be satisfied in God alone?
