POEM OF THE MONTH
ODYSSEY OF ATLAS Often, I find myself thinking of the world I used to live on.
Where the sun never stopped shining, and the ocean’s waters could not have been clearer.
I think of the streets.
The way no two roads were the same, and each crack in their structure was a testament to efficacy.
I also think of the other world on which I lived, the one I can barely remember.
Where the inky nights were stained with anger, disappointment, disdain, and tears.
Words that wrote themselves with the lead of my ambiguous frustrations.
In the same world, on another night, time ceased to exist.
The cicadas vibrations serenaded my exhausted body which radiated with heat.
The room enveloped by air sweet as the embrace of our hands in that shopping mall beside the wheat fields.
Then there is the world that I reside in now.
A world devoid of eternal sunshine, infernal journaling, and nocturnal daydreams.
A world where the whirring of seared wisps dictate fateless faces. Fading faces that see my eyes for all they can’t receive. Faces that leave me in a void of selflessness.
As my selfishness recedes, the teeming masks laugh at my tears while they ask me to be faster and better and as real as they perceive me to be, but I cannot leave.
Instead, I believe in the final world that I haven’t been to.
The one where interwoven webbed aquamarine gemstones blanket jet-black skyscrapers gleaming in pale moonlight.
The one where the tap dance of scintillating droplets stimulate my mind’s eye to sparkle in the dimmest light beside distant warm breezes brightly kissing the pen which brings all of this from life to my divine reality.
The one where all those unrelenting faces were just masks of themselves, the sharp lines and upside-down mouths wooden, blue, and splintered for my amusement.
I stare through the textured window fogged with needy thoughts and actions vying for my energy, attempts to deplete me of feeling and remedies.
Yet these are the beams on which I travel through dimensions.
The force in which I flow through the universe towards unknown possibilities, forever guiding me to worlds I could never even comprehend.
Often, I think of worlds I used to and will one day live on, but the earth in which I currently exist, is a solar system in and of itself.
CALEB KATSAKIS
Melbourne, VIC