#existential poetry

Is it not enough

That I leave the tv on, my cd player on, and my headphones in to forget that I’m alone.

The chaos in my brain distracts me from the reality, they’ll only stay once they get everything they wanted…

Well I’m what you wanted,

For a short time…

To spare oneself the embarrassment? No - to live it, skirting close along the walls of the laughing sewers

fondling the soporific odor of the ridiculous

insufflating the nausea and colitis made of vomit

inflaming the contempt scattered in the subsoil

waiting for the hatred to erode the oral cavity.

To spare oneself the farce? No - embody it, inject it full of nails and searing flames

tear it from the lyric we are forced to recite

accept it from the world into which we are hurled

thank it for having torn away the white veil

praise it in the immense theater of stasis.

To spare oneself the letdown? To render the spit like medicine for every ambition

the pressure a channel of mental discharge

the you-brought-it-on-yourself visceral betrayal

the waiting the coin easiest to sell

the shadow of one's own spirit the immortal corpse

You have been here when I needed you,

as if sitting on a carousel,

you are in the center, while the pony rises and falls.

Always movement, never a stop.

I am the hamster running in circles,

and I am Sisyphus, forever pushing my stone.

Everything changes.

I have no beginning, no end.

Only you remain,

and nothing else feels true.

A seal was sought, one meant to be broken, a pattern to be shattered on the run. The fuse of time, primed and about to burst, inside a labyrinth within a labyrinth,

that illusion turns to farce, that to deceive oneself is the blind hope foretold by the Vessel of infamy. To run is useless, and to stop

is the sign forbidden by Time itself, its fire will extinguish every fire of every dream, without compromise. His world is not an open book,

in this world there is nothing to choose, all has already been chosen by the Eye that thrashes in the endless fall. With what remains, what is there left

to look at? Names, bodies, ambitions that never stop revolving around their own name, not even when reduced to souls dispersed in liberty.

They say if earth hadn't landed in the Goldilocks Zone,

If cyanobacteria hadn’t produced oxygen for the atmosphere,

If we had no satellite moon to push and pull the tides,

If the dominoes hadn’t fallen perfectly to create earth’s conditions,

Life would not be possible.

But they also say that life evolves, adapts, until it is perfect for the conditions in which it finds itself,

That there are creatures thriving where we once believed life could not possibly survive,

That there are microbes that can only exist in a volcano,

There are multiple species of deep sea fish dwelling at 12,000 pounds of pressure per square inch,

That tardigrades can live in a vacuum and without sustenance for several years at a time,

That despite inhospitable conditions, life abounds.

So why do they say they are looking for another earth when life could have begun so very differently and still evolved to create advanced intelligent beings?

Why don’t they say that life has likely formed outside the boundaries of our limited understanding of the universe and its laws?

I have seen her within her eyes,

within those moments I stopped feeling,

while I try to describe what life means to me.

A loop leaves me without any apparent reason,

a moment is all that I have.

I will stop believing in the reasons

that led me

to these conclusions,

and I know well that I am imperfect.

Because of the mortality of my desires,

dying with every heartbeat in the background,

I do not want

to stop hearing the beeping sound

between life and death.

I remember your silhouette,

I remember who you are to me.

I will try not to depend on you,

if that makes me stronger,

even while the selfishness of others

I remember a walk that began without intention. The afternoon had folded itself into a gray softness. Clouds drifted low enough to brush the tops of distant trees, and the air carried that faint metallic scent that arrives just before rain announces itself. I could have stayed indoors. There were sensible reasons to remain dry, sensible reasons to postpone wandering, sensible reasons to…