Existential Dread

 

Death abounds

As abundant corpses

Formerly flourishing with cerebral artistry

Lie strewn against the cold, menacing streets

Whilst blood seeps through the smallest cracks

Of these paved, Man-made streets

Left behind,

We are nothing but individuals distilled

To our primal essence

Cruelly reduced to strands of

Random configurations of DNA

Identifying these material cadavers,

Where is the art of these lives anymore?

One of these fallen, blood-laden bodies

Formerly created rich symphonic compositions

That sang beautifully pitched tunes

Within the dark hollow of his skull

They remained unwritten

During his transient life

Another aspired to be a writer

Envisaging a glorious story

Patterned after her own complex life

Maybe the puzzling paradox of this self-created story

Might grant elusive answers

To the mystery of the personality that

Gives us the imaginative senses

To enumerate the objects of an accidental creation

Another was a scientist

Curiously resigned to the amoral stance of life

He vied for meaning amidst the

Litany of theories proposing

A Meaningless Universe

“That just is...”

In lieu of death,

The Music, the art,
the elaborate sports of ambiguity

                                                        All the Complicated theories
                                               of the seemingly absolutist sciences
                                                   Which we madly invoke in our lives

Are Reduced to that single, paradoxical

Nothingness in the short span

Of the Great Cosmic rip

                                                       

In the face of death

That cynical, atheistic denial of Meaning

Hardly differs from any other form of Delusion

None of these are substantive truths

They are a hopeless mantra

That imaginatively whisks the true

Face of death from the mortal disarray of our minds

 Undergirding our plastic illusion of bliss

Lies a great, strangulating fear of death

We can pathetically utter spells

Pretend that we are not fearful of

The implications of complete death

There is no one alive not afraid to die

When I die, I will tremble with

Crippling Fear of the horrifying

Revelation of what lies beneath

Maybe, I’ll never know for I’ll forget...

I won’t go looking for celestial heavens,

Or wear the clown mask of a

Seemingly Fearless Logician

Who frightfully yells their absolutist claims

To the empty, uncaring skies

Will I have a chance to even cry or contemplate?

Or like those whose bleeding bodies are strewn across the pavement

After a major car accident

Would my last casual laugh be my demise?

Certainly, it’d be nice to finish that chuckle

In an ineffable place of eternity

Or bring fulfillment to the deep sense of the void

Slumbering perpetually beneath my anxious feet

Who knows?

Not the scientific pundits, the priests, nor the philanthropists

In the end, our God is death

When we pray, we desperately beseech

Death to be meek and mild

If God is greater justice, death is equal in that regard

Our churches reside next to cemeteries

Science labs are filled with abundant relics of death

Thus, the two most sacrosanct places

Are essentially places of death

With death in our periphery,

So many deceased persons disintegrating

In our limited perception,

Is there any meaning anymore?

Or has meaning rotted with the face of my beloved?

Where is meaning beneath the confused paradox of death?

Does the universe die and live, much like us?

Are our scientific theories projections of mortality?

Is the “Big Bang” a Genesis?

Whilst the Big Rip our frightful mortal death

Manifested on a cosmic scale

Is there something nestled beyond our

Obstinate sense of nothing?

Can intelligence exist only in ourselves?

But be woefully nonexistent in the grander scale of existence

As Orpheus struggled to return from Hades

Did his desperate, mortal breath

Match the existential dread of a universe

Slowly resigning itself to death

In approximately five billion years

Are we wiping secretive tears over

The burgeoning sense of our

Very mysterious sense of nonbeing

Are heaven and hell better comforts

Than my growing sense of meaninglessness

Is my sense of the world an exploding star?

Forlornly transforming into a black hole

Sucking away every imaginary premise of meaning

Even the “black hole” blackens with the end of the universe

Does the universe end eventually?

Will creation become one big cosmic joke?

How can our intelligent senses be just cosmic dust

Desperately seeking meaning within the grander scale of unintelligible things?
How can a paradox exist from an anomaly?