At the top of the world, high upon Mt. Everest, the sky is more black than blue.
The air is just too thin there for the refraction of light to bend and pass through.
But there are places in the hearts and souls of men that are just as void of life and love,
places that have never risen to the dizzy heights where nothing waits but heaven above.
There is no star of hope in that black empty chamber of night, no shadows of silver gray,
but there, rests only the abscence of the Divine light with no promise of a coming day.
Here is a frozen puddle of tears, a mother cried who lost her child, a sad lament; a wail.
There is no port to launch the dreams of future times, no breath of life to fill their sails.
Here, the mourning pain of agony chokes and grips the spirit by the handle of doubt.
Woe; a cold chill wind, has blown upon the soul and the candle of life is snuffed out.
O Death, dear friend, sorrow finds it foolish you were ever considered a foe.
But now, with all the beauty gone from life, we long to walk wherever you go.
The nothingness far surpasses any representation of physical pain.
A cancerous mouth bares fangs and gnashes at the delicate tissues of the brain.
The longing cannot fill the lonely like the hoot owl's call from silent nights.
Darkness, empty, vast and only friend to desert sands that time has turned to ice.
Thundering echos of cannon fire with rumbling tanks that shudder and roar
roll over a landscape of broken bodies and the oozing entrails of endless war.
Here, a soldier screams and sweats, he turns face down to puke in the mud
and wakes in the morning with trembling lips he bites until he tastes the blood.
These are the places, the blank empty faces, that stare into an emptiness within
where once there lived a beating heart, no part is found where the darkness has been.
