Will you write me a poem about what it feels like to know you won’t exist anymore?
Sure thing, but it might be a little self-indulgent:
From the branches above you,
swaying just out of reach,
teeming with leaves and flowers
they hold out in mockery,
there are things that mock you
in ways that you have learned,
until you
live your life in mockery,
you don't think of it anymore.
They once were so appealing:
memories, good and bad,
love, drugs, sex, friendship,
mountain streams, the stars above,
the distant, winking promise
of all the things left to be done.
You used to spin stories
of what you would be
and at the time, it seemed
that a lifetime would let you get there.
And then you finally found it,
the one thing you had always yearned for.
You discovered a world
of wonder,
and this made you feel
you knew better now.
A world of more wonder
than you could ever know
except by exploring,
by feeling each moment
again and again, on purpose,
saying to yourself
you must not let yourself
stop caring.
Until you thought you'd had it all,
everything you could ever want,
resplendent in its fullness,
the one thing you had yearned for,
the one thing that had always eluded you,
and yet, now that you'd gotten it,
it was like you'd been cheated,
you had become something else,
what it was and what you wanted
were now separate, different things.
Without it you were lost.
You thought you could fix the problem
by moving forward and backward in time,
now and then and again and again,
you could flip things over,
and maybe you could make it all
out of the same, familiar ingredients,
if you just reran
this one thing
this one event,
whatever you'd learned
it was the event that made you,
to unlearn the world
that was shaped by it,
to unlearn love
and everything else
it had shaped,
until you came back to the present
in the same place you'd begun,
only then could you sleep,
only then were you safe.
You'd always found it hard
to unlearn what you'd been told
and you'd decided
you were not going to do it anymore.
So you always knew
that things would never be alright,
that the world was never right,
that it would always be unfinished,
that everything was off-key
and you could not be forgiven
for being what you were.
Your life was always going to be,
from start to finish,
an exercise in how
to go about things wrong,
to think things were alright
when you were about to be told
that you were not.
You expected to find yourself
living all the same things
all over again,
just in a different order.
You had always been the one
who felt left out,
who spent his days
just waiting for them to end,
who came to this place
just by chance.
And so you'd come to this place
at the end,
all by chance.
You thought,
maybe that is it,
maybe that is what it feels like
to know you won't exist anymore.
