There Is A Valley

Oh! save me from the raging human machine! Save me from the gray concrete and steam! Save me from those burned and rotted fields, and take me far away to the land of wounds healed! For surely there is more out there for us than this sordid haze of consumption and waste. There is a place. There is a valley. There is a valley amongst the vast and endless sea of the American scenery that exists outside our consciousness. There is a valley, and although I've never been, I can taste it's freshly-made winds. I can hear it's moral din, making it's way from cleaned streets over to the filth and the grime that is me.

There is a sickness. There is a sickness in our hearts, that grows with the unending vitality of a ravenous cancer. It consumes the soul! It swallows us whole! Down, down, down, until there is nothing of us left but fragile egos and frail selves. We destroy each other with insincere smiles, we attack with hateful handshakes – a catastrophe of conversation – a genial genocide. This is not the valley. We live in the city, where I watch my back at every corner. I sink my teeth at ever corner. And does anyone in the world realize how lonely we all are? Babygirl, don't listen to these two-cent sentiments – they drip like raindrops off my pale, chapped lips and establish absolutely no consequence. Just before our hips connect with bitter hostility and our limbs connect in raging revelry. We touch each other a lot, but absent is the passion, the screaming choir of our hearts, the teeming pallor of our skin, shining with the glow of feelings being fulfilled.

There is a loneliness. There is a loneliness in the city. So we continue on, fucking and false loving in the dilapidated rhythm, like words written on a rickety table, trying to salvage the truth that we felt good about ourselves in our finite youth. I scribble, and the letters ripple through the rivers of my consciousness, but is it ever enough to overcome this loneliness that stalks us? We walk this long and listless road, colored gray by wasted days. We walk it alone in our search for the valley. We are side by side, but we are isolated, locking hands with phantom fantasies, devestated by the alchemy of cheap and petty thrills, and desires unfulfilled. It is a thin armor of self-esteem, but it shields us from our self-defeat – it shields us from each other.

There is a darkness. There is a darkness. And so these are our lost American souls – we are the lonesome ghouls of the endless universe, trudging always with hunger across the endless earth, and we surrender substances, like it's the only cure. I am the cure! We are the cure! and I'd rather not litter this life, like a handful of bitter grime onto the slackened, slandered side of this dark, gray road. We trudge through the nervous, bleak, uncertain, but we shouldn't have to travel alone. One day, I want love to pour from my mouth like a torrential tide that wipes all our egos out. One day, I will speak, instead of being confined to blue and black ink. And I hope you speak, too – I hope it unites the whole hell-ridden lot of us!

Because there is a sickness! and there is a loneliness! and there is a darkness!... But... There is a valley. There is a valley. Will we ever get there? And what, then? Oh, I'm afraid. I'm afraid we'll bring our ghoulish days and human plagues all the way to the heavenly gates. When we finally make it to other side – when we finally make it to those greener fields – when we finally make it to Heaven... I'm afraid... Oh, save us from our abandonded factories which manufacture grim disease. Save us from our smoke stacks which will turn the angels' wings black. Save the glory and the peace, and all the grass colored green. Don't let it all be lost to the raging human machine.

One day, I'll find the valley. It's somewhere out there, hidden in the shadows of roads we don't know and the blackened souls we compose. It's somewhere here inside all of us, deeply buried beneath the hurt and maliciousness of our collectively lost innocence. Let's take a trip there – to the other side, where the grass is more green, more green! than those of our souls, which we attacked with lust and kerosene. Let's replace all of the question marks and armored hearts with the aching sting of need. I can't do this all by myself, and I'm tired of hiding behind curtly curated curtains of lusting limbs, and the thin, grim shroud of my spit-shined black clouds. Where is the answer? The cure for our cancer? I love you. And I love myself. That is all.







There is a valley all swimming in light.
There is a wonder and worry in life.
There is a reason and there is a light.
There is a valley all buried in light.
There is a reason and beauty in life.
There is a wonder and there is a light.
The wind in the trees and the tumbling light.
Whispering stars in the clouds tonight.
-"Pretty Little Lightning Paw"
by Thee Silver Mountain Reveries