I’m not looking for death,
just acknowledging it when I say
lately I’m striving
for great last words
to leave behind.
It would be so, so good
to push back
from the desk and say,
“At last.”
Every poem’s been
an attempted epitaph
or suicide note
that wasn’t good enough,
so I had to stay alive
to write a better one.
You’re going to moan,
“how morbid,” I know.
Call me goth or melancholy,
tell me I’m obsessed to the point of
mediocrity —
I have heard it so often
I take it to heart now and then
but I have no other way to be fully alive
than to look the inevitable
right in its deep dark maw
and try to stuff something down there
that it will choke on and
be unable to dissolve.
Dark Matter 
November 12th, 2020 at 11:43 am
Awareness of the dark/light combination inevitably includes ourselves. Makes us open to glory and despair. Sorrow and Joy are two sides of the same coin. Hope and Despair also. Our blessing and our curse is to have a vision of the ideal and awareness of the tawdry and perverse both without and within. Hell of a way to live with nothing measuring up to possibilities. But those glimpses of the glory are addicting… It’s out there somewhere….I cling to the hope that death is a doorway to it if we complete the course.