Midnight Poetry

INNER COMPASS

BIMBO CABIDOG

Humans associate midnight with the time when the dark forces reign, the situation is very bad, chances are down, and life is on the verge of flickering out. They hold it as a moment of suffering, when hope is lost, and pain is overwhelming.

The continuity of life outlasts it. Even though they fear such midnight, humans have the capacity to defeat the nightmares. The capacity is built-in. It gets into action once the danger of absolute negation looms.

When breath is about to snap, the soul miraculously detaches, pulls up, and awakens. The heaviness that straddles on top choking the body floats away as a dream.

When strength is sagging and energy ebbing to its lowest, a blast of rejuvenating wind blows in. When darkness becomes too pitched and smothering, light bores tiny holes at first that quickly gape as shafts of brightness punch through the inky veil. Negation no matter how extreme is always overpowered by the spreading dawn.

Because midnight passes, the one in it literally and figuratively is as sure as the sun to rise to another day. In the freshness of the morning, the old gloom loosens and clears. Fear and despair dissipate. Life is reenergized and renewed, and hails with a glorious sheen radiating from an inner core.

While midnight comes and goes, everyone with no exception must pass through the corridor. Yes, one dreads what he/she might encounter there in the dark unknown pregnant with killer phantoms of imagination. But for all the obliterating experience, no real day comes unless through it.

You may cringe and loathe about passing the channel, but going through it is not a mere choice. It is the flipside of all reality, the other half of your living essence – yes, the mysterious half.

You may be led to believe midnight as the daunting realities of the world you live in. Nay, it is the reality that dispels other realities including those. It is the only reality, the formless void that seems to take even your breath away.

Despite the negating blankness though, the midnight has a mystic attraction. It pulls like the suck of gravity, but incites resistance. It draws like a fervent desire to swim, yet repeals with a loathing to go into the water. It evokes daring to face fear, yet compels to get away from the uncertain.

Countless times of passage in one’s lifetime should have made the phenomenon all too familiar. But every encounter of it is still a mystery. As midnight expels other realities, there is in the yawning nothingness more than meets the eye. There is in the realm beings that to see is to close the eyes. There is in the void poetry that weaves rhythms.

With society’s advance, nature is always the greatest casualty. Generational upgrades in technology and contemporary lifestyles are expunging midnight as it used to be from human experience. They have ushered the untiring night life, and cities that don’t sleep.

Folks bring the cares and ceaseless drudgery of everyday deep into the midnight. The narrowing channel has come to less and less renew life with the vibrant auras that emanate from the core of being.

Today, the artificial world has recreated midnight and made it into an electrical day. From the invented time, zombies of folks who have long gone dead in the frenzied chasing of the elusive good life arise. Here, you no longer lay down to rest in the quiet of a parallel universe. You lay tinkering with your brains to fix sticky problems wakeful under the mechanical hum of the 24/7 buzzer.

As the bustle of day intrudes into the night, there is no more space for poetry to break the monotony of its grind. In the sacrosanct chamber of deeper consciousness, the contrasts that make life a wondrous opus recede. The dreamy interludes that keep it perfectly in tune leave. The original rhymes and rhythms from the dawn of creation discombobulate. The ceaseless discord, dissonance and sordidness of a hurried and harried existence completely take over.

Finally, it is no longer the dark spirits that seemingly lurk in the midnight that create men’s worst nightmares. What creates them is the break-neck race and maddening pursuit driven by lust for material possessions, power and money, in the broad light of day.