Sometimes it's just you.
Sometimes the world goes stark and barren.
And it's only you.
You can romanticize unprovoked onslaughts
and enemies and devil tongues taunting.
But in the dry silence of dawn
you recognize the voice of your accusers.
They are regret. They are shame.
And they are truth, bare and raw.
They are self, in all its nakedness and honesty.
And because this twisted mass of reproach and remorse is self,
You are committed to love it, if only because it is human.
You must love it even more because it is you,
and you alone are responsible for it.
You cannot recoil in repulsion and disgust
or simply leave it to its own -
pricked bloody in its writhing against its own thorns,
a hazard to any who happen upon it.
You must swallow hard against revulsion.
You must cradle this thing and hold it,
look deep into its darkness
and try with all your heart and mind to understand.
Then to set it on its feet again,
and teach it how to walk in the world;
looking not to the prints of those who have gone before,
but learning - as you step, and fall,
then rise and walk again -
to dance the shifting light and shadows.
And you laugh tenderly to yourself,
as this old man teeters and stumbles like a child,
even in the grayness of his years.
You find it in your heart to hope, and love again
your devil in the desert.
Because it's just you.