The endless night between stars.
I pass through on a voyage to nowhere.
Ethereal nebulas painted by galactic empyreans.
Beautiful mystic serenity.

I love these travels.
The ones to nowhere.
You just leave in all directions.
No maps or legends.  

You really never find where it takes you.
Its endless and eternal.
Beginnings with no ends.
Forgotten Gods remembered.

A palette of paint to paint his face,
Clothes full of colours bright,
A round red nose that bobs like a ball,
He is ready with a smile.

Comic antics that delight folks,
He rides, slides, cartwheels and falls,
Slips on banana peels, juggles fruit,
Tickled faces all.

When night comes, off comes the paint,
The nose, the wig, the clothes bright,
In dwindling darkness he rests himself,
Now his face he hides.

A jester, he jested, he cheered —
A camouflage in art,
But to himself, alone and quiet,
He rests his aching heart.

An act extraordinaire —
Oh how he does beguile,
But to himself, now alone,
Who’ll make the jester smile?

I mistook the weight of absence for clarity,
as if the silence meant something resolved.
But I find no finality in distance,
only echoes that shift when I turn away.

Certainty was never more than a flicker,
a brief pause in an unsteady hand.
Even now, I trace the outlines of the past
as if repetition could make it solid.

But the shape keeps changing,
just like it always does.

I did not ask to stand in light,
nor walk the stage, nor speak my lines.
Yet here I am—through fault, through fight,
through twenty years of measured time.

The script is looped, the plot is stale,
the exits marked in hollow lead.
To fight is folly, frail, and fraught,
to fold is merely left unsaid.

No gods to beg, no fate to barter,
no judge to weigh what I have spent.
I claim this act, its ink, its end,
I take the bow, the stage is bent.

And still—the show will stagger on,
past hollow men and empty breath.
But I was here, and let it stand,
this ending was my own to set.