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Mar 2015
There's a man in my head
He speaks to me in silence and in dreams
What he is, I do not know
But it doesn’t really matter

In the silence, he asks me
“What do you hear?”
I hear the hissing of the sand
Falling through the proverbial hourglass
Like a vaporous snake sifting through the silt
On the banks of an endless river
Like snowflake after snowflake
Caressing the ground with winter’s edifice of ice
Until everything is locked away, buried and frozen
I hear the ringing vibrations of subatomic particles
Ascending to crescendos and sinking
Into gentle diminuendos as electrons are exchanged
I hear the Earth trading momentum with the moon
As they rotate and revolve through the vacuum of the Universe
In a continuous gift before forever falling away
And leaving nothing behind but an empty ecliptic

“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“It hurts like hell.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“Sometimes I cant. Sometimes all I want to do is sleep.”

And in my dreams he asks
“What do you see?”
I see a cell growing and dividing
Into all the people that I know
I see their blood vessels transmuting into trees
And their arms folding into wings that
Carry them to heaven while stone shifts like water
Beneath them and the seas go dark
I see the Earth condensing out of asteroids
And being swallowed by the Sun
I watch inertia carry light and color along the tail of a comet
And into clouds of gas and dust that swirl in the vacuum
Of the Universe, like the stars of a galaxy
Crumbling into a black hole, down the drain of gravity
That bends superclusters into the blood vessels
Of a human eye, I see nothing and everything
I see life and death and the profound mystery of existence
Most of all, I see myself

“Does it scare you?”
“It’s ******* terrifying.”
“How do you cope?”
“Sometimes I cant. Sometimes all I want to do is die.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Because sometimes it’s so beautiful.”

And in my nightmares he asks me
“Why don’t you just end it all?”
“Because I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you want the suffering to be over?”
“I’m not so sure it will be.”

The only thing I know of death is the absence of life
Just like darkness is the absence of light
And I can’t fathom what that nothingness is
I can’t comprehend the absence of life

“Well, do you have a soul?”

Is all that I am a murmur of electricity?
A chemical reaction inside of some adipose?
Is there nothing in the darkness of my pupil
Or is there only the absence of light?
Is all that I am just a sequence of nucleotides
Transcripted and translated, again and again
For no reason other than the absence of chaos?
If that’s all that life is then how can there be peace in death?
Or is there only nothing?
The only thing I understand
Is that there's something more
That I can't understand

"Well, do you?"
“I don’t know.”
“Then what am I?”
“Something that exists in dreams.”
“Then what’s in a dream?”
“I don’t know, please go away.”
“I can’t go away. I will never go away.”

There’s a man in my head
He speaks to me in hatred and in bliss
And I don’t know who he is
Or if he even is
But he lives in the pit of my stomach
He lives in between the wrinkles around my eyes
And he is oh so curious about things that we aren’t meant to know
And he will never go away
But it doesn’t really matter
I mostly write existential whining
Teo
Written by
Teo
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   --- and Nancy E Tracy
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