he was careful to keep his chest thrust out, 'opening the wind' the old runners called it. his feet slapped the earth in rythm, driving up clouds of red dust that billowed in his wake. he ran neither fast nor slow, but steadily..  gaining ground as invitably as the years gain their foothold inside the bodies of men, eating up distance, leaving the days and nights piled up behind him like a broken string of beads.

if it were not for the great water, he thought, i might have circled the earth already.

sometimes he ran in the day, othertimes at night. for this decision he listened to his own body murmuring, to his belly. if it complained. if it laboured. if it made a meal of the simplest tasks, it would be a night run, fluttering as a moth might through the darkness of the horned moon.

sometimes he ran in the night for his own safety.

not everyone respected the runner.

 on some days when they saw him come running silently from the bamboo hills they would scatter as if a storm were brewing, ringing bells and catching up their children, they would catch him then, if they could then.. beating him with sticks and setting their dogs at his heels.

they called him a thief, though his intent was never to steal.

when he grew lonely he would snatch up a child, only to deposit her miles from her home. he would release cattle from their pens, sheep from their enclosures.. reach into wooden cages to release birds. horses would break into a gallop as he approached and race alongside him, to the constenation of owners, who short of breath, would

shout and threaten him from the distance

he would make a game of racing the sun to the horizon, or outstripping the rain clouds as they poured across the sky.

ii

i am a story teller first, he would say, and a runner second. The latter necessarily follows on the heels of the former. I do not commit my words to ink, because i cannot seperate myself from my story, but i  never stop running in case my stories swallow me up. I see the the disease everywhere, you people who have stayed to long in one place and have been eaten up, your storytellers sick,

 pale and wandering the night

the mind is like a mountain weed, it is tough, it can survive on the side of a sheer cliff and flourish for tens of years, it watches the body of the world with neverending lust dreaming of deep roots

i prefer to be like the feathered seed that lives within the wind,  that lays flowers as offerings before the human mind.

iii

when we were young, words were like holes in the fabric of great tent, that revealed the fiery turbulence of the beyond, or like stars in the night sky shining down with a mysterious light

gradually the light faded, and those words became like windows opening up onto a brick wall, avenues of no escape

words have been eroded by design, and now they form a diabolical trap,

be wary of whom you may exchange ideas with.

iv

it seems that there are two kinds of story-tellers in this world, the first never leaves the womb ; lives on fever and hallucinations. his ramblings, if he has genius, have the quality of cooling opium smoke.. if he does not, it is merely a loose collection of discontinous ideas, at best a whole bunch a  semi-precious stones on a kite string.

the other, the true writer, has broken the handcuffs of his time, roams the urban wilderness, the prehistoric mountains where you might find him in any age, shivering, dancing, crying out passionately in a dispassionate wilderness.

it seems that poets come from both these stock, men snatching at momentary breaks in the clouds.

v

what is your history before the darkness?  you have nothing, and all your history is nothing but a torch held up against the night. what have you truly gained in two thousand years.. nothing, death and the infinite are one and the same, still completely out of reach.

 infinity laps at your stone, pressed down on your cities and smothers you in your sleep.