Friday, December 13, 2024

Diner at the End of Democracy

 

I'm just here to watch the show...
I was summoned from the darkness
To observe...
Condensed from the primordial chaos 
To see these moments in history...
The drama and the stupidity...
The sensationalized ignorance...
The guilded misanthropy...
Sitting in the diner at the end of democracy
While sipping murky gray coffee...
Occasionally scribbling into the journal...
Pouring words in with a funnel...
Gently tamping them down
Before securing the wad and the musket ball...

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Betelgeuse Going Supernova


 At the time,  
We thought we were doing   
Exactly what we were supposed to do,  
Given the circumstances.  
  
Ain't that always the way?  
  
We think we're in love...  
We think we're justified...  
We think that one step must necessarily  
Follow another...  
We think life is supposed to make sense...  
  
Existence has no obligation to make sense.  
  
We do what we can to understand it,  
But, even if we figure a part of it out,  
there's always one more thing that we don't understand...  
  
Unending fields of things that we don't understand...  
  
The mystery lives on in our own ignorance,
Self-imposed or not...  
  
We can imagine this or that...  
We can convince ourselves that our thoughts are reality,  
That our vivid imaginings are tangible things with height, depth, width, and history...  
  
In our vanity, we worship our own creations...  
We give tithe to them...  
  
Thoughts are like ghosts...  
Unwritten journal entries...  
That letter you wrote, but didn't send...  
  
Some are burned away,  
Some are stored away in boxes...  
That slight smell of mildew and old books...  
Memory, an imperfect and uncredible storyteller...  
  
We do what we can with whatever we find...  

Saturday, May 4, 2024

Afterimage

 



If I were to die tomorrow,
[I'm not planning on it...
I plan on sticking around on this rock  
For as many years as I can get...  
Ideally, a handful of decades...]  
But...  
If I were to die tomorrow,  
I could say I tried...  
That I gave it my best effort...  
Whether I was doing good things,  
Or doing bad things,  
I did them with all of my mental focus and strength of will...  
The levels of those aforementioned things,  
Mental focus and strength of will,  
Have fluctuated over the years  
In biorhythmic waves,  
But I use whatever I find in the tool box...  
Moment by moment passing...  
Experiences gathered together in bouquets...  
Memories made, and held,  
Or forgotten...  
Editing on the fly...  
Some choice, some chance...  
Alternating Heaven and Hell balanced by periods of limbo...  
Everything in it's place in the display case...  
The thing that wears the suit  
Doesn't exist until the suit is made...  
Moment after moment forming and dissolving...  
Frame after frame  
Successively revealed and then hidden...  
Summoned from primordial chaos,  
For just one, single moment,  
Before grounding the charge into the Earth...  
A timer running out...  
One stage following the next...  
Cause and effect rarely tastes like intention...  
God lives in the gaps  
Between those layers of steel that didn't quite weld while the ingot was in the forge...  
Only a handful of days before I hit the road...  
Riding off into the sunset, offset by 90°...  

Monday, January 22, 2024

Reductive


The farther you look back. 
Towards what you think is the beginning,  
The less you know...  
Eons may have passed...  
Infinities traversed...  
Reaching out over vast emptiness...  
Reaching past the cold darkness. 
To where you were plucked from the void...  
To where every atom of your body was created...  
Distant past...  
Before stars and planets...  
Before protons, neutrons, and electrons...  
Before light could escape the soup...  
But it wasn't even the first time...
It wasn't unique...  
There was time before time...  
Breathing in...  
Breathing out...  
Contraction and expansion...  
The cold and the hot...  
So much more than this one life...  
One tiny dust mote, 
Carried by the flow...  
Overwhelmed by the deep...  
Lost in history...  
Billions of human lives obscured by those who have held power...  
By those who have made themselves gods among men, or tried vainly, at least, to convince the forgotten to remember them as such...  
We pay for our brief existence with our blood...  

Colosseum

There's a school of thought Concerning our ultimate end Positing that we don't experience our own death... That there are branching ...