The Wolves of Midwinter

Sunday, July 08, 2012

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?

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