I sit at the table too high for me,
Slipping the poison down my throat,
Sewn shut my mind through mouth,
As I feel the darkness bloat.

Yet I know it’s due to me alone,
My hand the wretched doer of the stab
Which rends my heart at my bequeath,
Yet how can I help who I am?

The invisible flame all too bright,
Casts my shadow invoking fear,
I willingly forget not to shun
The things I held most dear.

My mind falls deeper into the mire,
Shallower with each sinking death,
I tell them to ignore the silent screams
Though I cry for help under my breath.

And though these echoes are not heard,
They crash and boom and threaten to break
Innocence is swallowed whole again,
As I stand chained at the hand of fate.

A different man I stand today
Than the one who failed once before,
Yet I fail again, this time completely,
It is being me I must endure.

For leaping only leads to falling,
First time jumping interceded by floor,
Sitting in shame that isn’t mine
How can I hope to jump ever more?

I ask with a resounding
Question “Who am I?”
Praise from the edges of my view,
But never from the distant sky

Yet somehow the light appears ahead,
The rescuers lifting me from the shadows within
How could I have sought this ugly fate,
When there were others bright that could’ve been?

I’ve wasted time on distant stars
So shining, beckoning in my mind.
Why should I wait longer to start the rest of my life?
It’s time I left that path behind.

Just blinks of the universe on the skin of a pale blue dot
hovering at the edge of a swirling miasma of a myriad stars

We search for our place; let down by our lack of role in the grand scheme of existence
But only because we value ourselves too highly.
There is a beauty in the void; a renewal of spirit in acknowledging that we are not bound to a fate,
that we can go in any direction- that we may live our lives
without them simply being a test. There is no plan.
But who wants to live a planned life?
We search for the meaning that is not there to console ourselves in the cold reaches of the universe.
We find nothing- nothing but our own desperation.
We exist. Nothing more, nothing less than simple existence for us to interpret as we will.
That’s enough for me.
With this in mind, our lives- while still just phantasms fading from the skin of a pale blue dot
hovering at the edge of a swirling miasma of a myriad stars, gone before the universe’s eternity even begins to tick- have a purpose.

No longer are we bound to an eternity based on a mere shadow of a life, but now we can live! We can be free!
Our lives are ours to make what we will. To discover, explore, learn, to savour, to love… to leave the world better than we entered it, yet we do it not to please the cosmos but for our own enrichment. This is the significance of our lives.
Carpe diem, sieze the day: because it is one of the approximately 29 219 your being will ever have. Our minds are but the transient states of the universe, convening for a brief touch before going their separate ways- use that moment. It is all you are.
Let’s be reckless, do amazing and stupid things together for the brief cosmological second we share. Life flashes away as the universe’s heart mechanically beats.
Life is fleeting, we are sad, but there is nothing more than life- so let us live
Even though we are simply accidental spectres of thought on the skin of a pale blue dot
hovering at the edge of a swirling miasma of a myriad stars

The arrangement of photons hits my eyes
Like a blast
For it could be any- it is just light
But no, it is not.
It is a face I see
Not just any,
Nay, not of the ordinary,
And yet it could be any.
Not in terms of its source, its literal transmission
Of the image- that is only you represented.
But it is more.
It is a vessel of life to my eyes,
Every glimpse a thumping rhythm and racing monologue
For it is not just the light reaching my eyes-
No, it could not just be any-
For it is you
And everything you are
And therefore it is
Like nothing I have ever seen.

Abandoned dusty in the attic
A shadow flitters around the edge
Caressing the smoky veil of glass,
Searching to remember his first waking moment,
When he had become but a phantom
Of a man-
but alas... it had been always.

Silently knocking on the wall
Which holds him from the other side-
You saunter by and blink
And shun the one moment you could have seen
And he is forgotten from the ones who never knew him
And the fabric
Runs like soot over his world.

His eyes see but the ghost of the substantial,
His world imaginary staring through a window of glass
From which shines an impossible prism
Cutting a path through the smoky din
The dream-dust settles, making it but a circle
Glowing in the light
That he could live in another’s eyes.

The mirror shatters.
Crushing glass slashing shards into the air
Shrieks erupt as the phantasm is
For the first time known,
The storm that had been hidden in that one-way mirror
Now unleashed, yet
You avert your eyes as if it was still a pane of glass.

The precipice, that heart-strung edge
Feet resting on the threshold
The fabled point of no return
Time stops and slows; I’m getting old

Waiting for my heart to call
That call to make me spurn the edge
For into darkness I do release
The thorns and thickets of the hedge

But should I not be pricked by
The disillusionment of fate
In the unrest of the shadows
A wond’rous light does sure await

And so I stand upon the precipice
Unaware where my feet shall find an end
But I’ve been too long; I start to slip
Nature’s gravity begs that I descend.