Act I: The Universe Breathes, and I Am an Afterthought

I arrived late to existence,
billions of years after the stars had their golden age.
Missed the Big Bang,
missed the Renaissance,
missed the time when love letters were written on paper,
instead of reducing feelings to keystrokes.

They handed me a body,
a mind that questions too much,
and a world obsessed with carving meaning out of chaos—
as if Sisyphus hadn’t already proven
we’re all just rolling boulders uphill,
pretending not to notice the futility.

Act II: The Weight of Knowing, the Lightness of Forgetting

Socrates said, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
I read that at 3 a.m. and felt personally attacked.
Descartes told me, “I think, therefore I am,”
but some days, I think too much and forget how to be.

History is a carousel of déjà vu,
spinning the same tragedies on repeat.
Empires fall, currencies crash,
trends resurrect themselves like poorly buried ghosts.
The Greeks feared hubris,
the Romans feared the barbarians,
I fear how meaning crumbles when no one is left to remember.

Act III: Beyond Meaning, Beyond Regret

Maybe Dante was right—
hell isn’t fire, it’s bureaucracy.
Maybe we’re just modern Stoics in overpriced hoodies,
romanticizing the art of being okay with things we can’t change.

Maybe meaning isn’t found in grand gestures,
but in the quiet absurdity of it all—
in watching the sun rise like it’s not exhausted,
in laughing at a joke older than Shakespeare,
in knowing that despite wars, collapses, heartbreaks, and lost civilizations—
someone, somewhere, still bakes bread from scratch,
still hums a song they don’t remember the name of,
still chooses to keep going.

Final Scene: To Exist Is to Hesitate, and Yet—

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
I’m still figuring out my why.
But in the meantime,
I’ll sip my coffee, watch the world spin,
and pretend I was always meant to be here.

She was an old barn cat, around the place for
a dozen years or more. Superb mouser and
yard hunter. Came from feral parents, aloof
by nature, and breeding, a little wild at heart
I suppose.  In time she developed some slight
affection for some of my family, me included,
eventually a regular welcomed visitor to my
porch, even crawling upon my lap for pat and
scratch under her chin but always declining to
be held by any human being.

She would come when I called her, running
full tilt and jumping fences, ignoring the food
just wanting companionship and attention.
Over the years she and I became good friends.
She came every day, morning and evening to say
hello and oh yes, get an offered meal. Rubbing
her sleek cat body on my feet and legs, offering
up her affection with an audible purring for
everyone to hear even from some distance.

Her age was starting to show, thinner, slower, she
was getting on just as I am, perhaps we both knew
it. Last night she came to the glass door and looked
so forlorn. Though cold outside I put on a coat and
brought her out some food, and I sat in my chair.

She sniffed the food with disinterest then came
over to flop upon my feet softly meowing, I could
feel her little purr motor vibrating on my shoes.
I reached down and gave her a tummy scratch,
she always loved that.

We resided like that for a while, her upon my feet,
me in my chair. Becoming too cold I started to rise
to go back inside, but Daisy did not move, I reached
down and felt no purr vibration, she was unmoving
and silent. In that moment I knew that she had passed
from this earth. I picked up her now limp unresisting
body and placed her on my lap, my eyes teared knowing
that she was gone.

So sudden, one minute there and then just gone.
Not a bad way to go, rather than some long-drawn
-out affair, with doctors, useless operations, hospice
and lingering formidable pain. Just lay down and
go to sleep.

We should all be that lucky when our time comes.

silence moored like a boat in the harbour,
and you flew against the horizon like a bird  

until my mouth was the night with its hungry stars
and you were the sea wind.

you were the night flowering, a ripple on
the surface of the water, the dreams of the ocean...

your eyes told me that history is made of a
a thousand bleeding wounds, your lips that

kisses are petals falling from a rose
and that we wait like old moons for night

to melt on the shore and set us free, we wait,
unquestionably free, for her gathering of

iris and blue bird, for her beautiful
and melancholy song.

They run,
through streets that scream of bomb smoke and shattered bone,
their shadows swallowed by the black of hijabs,
a mother swaddles her babe, her heartbeat louder than the guns.

Blood whispers its story
on trembling hands—whose hands?
Hers, his, the boy too small to carry grief,
but already has it, pressed like a kiss on his brow.

How long?
How long before the dream of faces turns to ash?
Before names become nothing more than echoes
sung to the fleeing, like lullabies of loss?

The gun is no longer an object;
it is an extension of them, fused to flesh,
its weight the weight of survival,
its promise another lie whispered to the children.

They run,
but the streets do not let go.
The ruins hold their breath,
cradle them in decay,
and ask, "How much longer?"

The answer—
silent, like the graves they leave behind.