Climbing Babel ★★★★

I can't buy a stairway to heaven
but I can build a tower of Babel
just to watch it crumble
before it can ever get so close
as to scratch at the belly of God.
For this we are told,
we are ruined and cursed
for the crime of self importance
and strength of direction.

The weight of potential
an almost tangible burden,
sometimes my thoughts
begin to hold me down.
I can feel the settling on my shoulders.
I feel I have no choice
but to walk in the grooves
cut by the feet of Sisyphus
forcing onward
until my skin is pricked by icebergs
and I sink into the ghosts of the Atlantic.

Every journey begins with a destination,
a tidy ending,
or else resigned acceptance of inevitable
self consumption.
Assigning ourselves
to a recursive purgatory,
we refuse to relinquish
our unending processes,
cursing Gödel,
God,
for our failure to complete.

All is finite,
though we might run from death
or mourn our childhoods
and broken hearts.
It is in our nature.
Just as it is to set,
still,
such unattainable goals.
We crave perfection
and consume our heroes,
build lofty towers
of brick and faith and pain,
even though printed in their existence
is the preconceived collapse,
the defiance of nature
toward perpetual motion.

An infinite amount of force is needed
to get anywhere these days
when we can't pin our thoughts
to the light.
We are surprised at the hurt
when we never wrote the ending
and the words escape us
and the ground fails us
and we fall.
Those beside us look down
and sort of shrug
their eyes sinking somewhere
and say
and say
you did your best
who could have known?