#existentialreflection
I learned myself by the slow attrition of days
by measuring each syllable against the pulse of my own essence,
and settling its debt in the quiet tremor of my spirit.
Do I not know the sovereignty of language,
its sharp wind and its subtle flame?
Has not candor stripped my lips raw,
yet left my tongue luminous,
scarred but unbowed?
My voice was never gifted whole;
it was forged in the furnace of absence,
tempered by my fatigue and the vigil of nights,
where the firmament murmured only to itself,
and the constellations traced riddles across my restless mind.
I do not write from the theatrics of naïve despair;
did I choose these words because they betrayed me,
or because I could not allow betrayal to define my existence?
I choose, therefore I persist,
not by faith, but by my own unyielding devotion to the act.
I navigate thought as one drifts across a lake of fractured crystal,
each idea a prism reflecting a sky I cannot enter,
the currents of my reflection twist without end.
Memory rises like burning mercury over flowing amber,
its flow carrying the heat of what I was,
yet forming intricate lattices I can still touch.
Even absence holds shape,
even silence can be sculpted into echo.
Language rests in my hands and on tongue like frost on lava formed obsidian glass,
its edges keen, even surgical, its resonance still trembling with self restraint.
Shall I leave it mute, untested?
or shall I coax the frost to sing a lullaby,
for even my shattered lyre remembers its own rhyme and soft touch of music,
and my void preserves its own geometry.
When I write of collapse,
I do not crumble;
certainly tension endures,
even as my undoing bends toward pattern,
and each line I trace is a beam
propping the architecture of my persistence and understanding.
Do I seek rescue?
Do I yearn for redemption?
nay for this is where i now swim,
I dwell in the narrow country between extremes,
where I am both witness and artisan.
My suffering is not spectacle;
it is my ledger of encounter,
a carefully crafted journal of truth,
my testament, not a plea.
Each line I cast into the void
is a root pressed into the bedrock of my solitude, coal that will find precious existence,
proof that I have traversed my exile
and refused erasure, that in these line there is something greater than salvation.
There is courage here, and hope although it whispers.
Is my courage that,
a act of believing, or of enduring without promise?
To admit that wonder does not always answer, that the muse ignores,
that meaning sometimes refuses to arrive,
yet still i carve absence into contour,
grant the void a silhouette, a shadow
and call it my own
is that not my quietest triumph?
It's this i ask myself.....
I am not guided by hope, but it's there, in a brittle prism; it fractures in my tightened grasp.
I am guided by integrity and my personal truth to self
the austere discipline of remaining upright
when inspiration has abandoned my chamber.
This is not the work of one chasing fire;
it is my tale, my witness, my testament of how I burn without.
I stand in the frost of my unlit hours,
marking the darkness with lines of light,
aware that the void listens,
and I write what pours from within
not to be saved, or even remembered
but to be awake,
and fully, inexorably, myself,
on a journey to find the line that defines what's real.
Jan 7
Jan 7, 2026 at 11:38 AM UTC
In Africa, _“empty”_ means a glass bottle for deposit.
In my place, empty is the feeling in my heart made of glass.
Empty is my soul searching for something to deposit,
something to believe in beyond what’s missing.
Empty are my prayers that rise, but never land —
echoes sent to a heaven, but on silent mode.
Empty is my credit card trying to buy into something,
to belong, to matter, to afford the illusion of enough.
Empty is what poverty seems to fill me with, ironically —
the kind of fullness that starves.
Empty is what Africa seems to make a lot of dreams feel
like; big visions bottled and left beneath the sun to fade.
Empty are the potholes, the roads that once dreamed of
being whole, filled with yesterday’s rain, tomorrow’s silence.
Empty is my hand without a ring, yet bound to too many
hearts, giving my love to those who only love being loved.
Empty is a love of you and I already in collusion; accidental
love, where our hearts trade promises like borrowed coins.
Empty are the plans we toast to with no means to chase,
all the smiles we wear when the truth’s too heavy to carry.
Empty could mean a lot of things to you and me, but empty
in Africa, means a glass bottle for deposit — and our tears
are what made the payment.
Nov 11, 2025
Nov 11, 2025 at 9:08 PM UTC
Time doesn’t weigh much — even when you’re fed
every second of it. Food for thought piles up like
leftovers, a full plate of ideas you never quite digest.
We serve our dreams once they wake, laid bare beneath
an open space —hoping stars will shine back on what
we once believed in. But from a distance, everything
looks so harmless — get close enough, and it burns
through our skin. _Dreams, truth, love_ — they all come
with scorch marks when held too long.
Time steals slow, but mistakes move fast. You step
wrong and feel it instantly — unless your pride is
a glass slipper, and you’re too _enchanted_ to feel the
crack. Because it’s one thing to know what you’re
not — you’re not a clock spinning past reason,
you’re flesh and fatigue, and this life… it winds down.
A broken clock still gets it right twice a day — but a
broken person has __twice the time__ to bury themselves
or choose to rise and __heal__.
Jul 16, 2025
Jul 16, 2025 at 7:50 AM UTC
Standing on top of each morning briefly
stopping by each evening shortly
unmindful, my eyes are chasing,
my eyelids are sweeping with light the sky
splattered with colours pilled out
after hitting horizon's last shore.
I am thinking
what is this crimson,
colour of lovers' hearts
torn from each other and
taking on to opposite paths,
or the reddish glow of minds
come together after
dark moments of separation?
Half of my life is soaked in colour
watching these red glows
spilled over the side-door that admits the day
and the bamboo portals
that shut out the day,
but could not understand
whether this earth and sky
part in the evening
and meet in the morning
or part in the morning
and meet in the evening!
-०-
Jun 9, 2025
Jun 9, 2025 at 1:06 AM UTC
__I. TARNISH__
__We procreate fate, from bones to belief,__
Wearing faith like a second skin— daily
soiled, weather-worn by noise and news.
Socially religious; actions are mere talk
we preach in later posts, and not prayers.
__We remember songs line for line,__ forgetting
words to the Word, that once shaped us.
__II. INTERROGATION__
_Where is your faith?_ —asks the heart.
_Where will you be in five years?_ —asks the mind.
And there—between tears and time— _laziness
holds patience, procrastination becomes a religion._
As I wear the mask of a man knowing what he’s
doing, but the fit is too perfect –to ever feel like
Truth.
__III. CONFESSION__
O Lord, hear the slow-breaking cry of my soul,
lest I forget the sound of my own weeping.
My prayers, once daily bread, are now scattered
crumbs, too few, too faint to carry my mourning,
Into the morning. And you won't hear the dirge
in my less frequent prayers or their “Amen.”
Jun 3, 2025
Jun 3, 2025 at 7:03 PM UTC