"...all Narnia will...perish in fire and water."

With bowed crown I paced steadily, silent, and alone across the darkened floor.  Bleachers lined the wall to my left. Their complete fall ended at my feet.  To my right was a stage.  Illumined by the only burning light, an artist perched on his platform as he gently sang a song he believed.  It was safe in his voice. 

"It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift..."

Between he and I was a void twice as wide as his audience.  We were more than oceans apart.

"...Well baby, I’ve been here before
I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor
You know, I used to live alone before I knew ya..."

His song was enchantingly somber.  It penetrated my skin, coursed through my veins, dug into my skeleton, invaded my body, attempted to resuscitate the vitals that could call me back. 

"...But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was..."

Those traitors upon which I stand continued their own indifferent beat until they carried me to the center.   I was a specter of the elevated performer; he hunched over his instrument, I over the chasm in my chest.  From my land of shadows I crossed him on his pedestal.  For a moment, we eclipsed.  He struck his crescendo:

"Hallelujah!" : a roaring proclamation. 
"Hallelujah," : a statement.
"Hallelujah..." : a hope.

Trembling from core to cuticle, the song flickered out.  Transparency drowned in my murky, downcast eyes as I turned to ascend the bleachers.

*     *     *

"...Love is not a victory march;
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

And it’s not a cry that you hear at night.
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light.
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah."

from my notebook for BIO 1530

"I wanna see the earth start shaking.  I wanna see a generation finally waking up inside."

We're all still waiting for an alarm to go off.  What we don't realize is that we're asleep, we are not fully alive. 

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.  Look deep and hard into every set you have contact with.  Tell me they're all alike.  Tell me they are all equally alert and joyful and suffering and deep and alive.  I dare you.

I'm sitting here with the above lyric chanting in my head and moving in my soul, and I'm wondering what it's going to take.  Does humanity have a breaking point, when all at once a pristine clarity descends on humanity like a fog on the moor?  When will we wake up?

I glanced down at the pen resting in my hand, poised to scar this paper.  For a moment I realized how much power I hold weightlessly in this ten-cent object, daily in my right hand.

In my eighth grade literature class, we read a short story about these people on an adventure for kicks.  They happened upon this valley full of sleeping dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs eyes were rolling under their lids - they were in the middle of REM.  Their sleep was induced, as the humans soon realized.  They'd been sleeping, unnoticed, for thousands upon thousands of years.  The story ended with the ground shaking rhythmically, the people fleeing; millenia later the dinosaurs had finally woken.

"I wanna see the earth start shaking.  I wanna see a generation finally waking up inside."