The nights stretch longer, the air tastes of rust,
Each breath a requiem, thickened with dust.
The moon hums dirges through hollowed-out trees,
A choir of silence that never appeases.

I have walked every road, I have conquered and bled,
Built towers from nothing, laid ghosts in their bed.
Yet the stars seem dimmer, the heavens too wide,
And I wonder if something still stirs on the tide.

What more is there, when the echoes grow weak?
When the mirror reflects, but no longer speaks?
The weight of the world was once mine to defy,
Now I carry the hush of a long-breathing sigh.

I was never to break, never to bend,
But the ink fades from pages, the stories must end.
Not in sorrow, nor fire, nor whispering knell,
But in something far softer—a slow, ringing bell.

So let me dissolve where the dusk meets the sea,
Let the waves carve another, unburdened, of me.
Let the salt fill my lungs, let the tide pull me deep,
Where the stars dare not glimmer, where the lost come to sleep.

Let the soil forget me, let time lose my name,
Let the roots twist unchecked through the place that I lay.
No eulogies whispered, no stones left to mark,
Only the weight of the night and the dark.