That Good Black Light

Verily, I always have that soothing black light off the eternal emptiness deep inside to comfort me

That universal darkness is so secure and everlasting: My silent faith is as a featureless black monolith

Though my eyes were closed and my optic nerve severed, I would still perceive its blank perfection

I am utterly unable to be disappointed given the absolutely empty oblivion which I know awaits me

That wondrous and everlasting truth remains likewise blacker than anything my eyes can ever see

This good black light envelops their fairytale brightness that threatens to well up within me

I shine my black flashlight on all those unpleasantries that I really don’t want to have to perceive

I keep my black headlights on low beam to narrow my focus which really helps calm my fears

The royal coat of arms of my beliefs is that gaping black hole at the center of our galaxy

For, yea, all that endlessly increasing and irreversible darkness is the cornerstone of my faith

Totally devoid of any purpose or promise: Purest achromaticity simply has no way to ever fail me

Colorless, silent, empty, and consciousless: It draws me back, to diffuse me to nothing, forever

Assured of resting almost without motion, I will regain the universal standard of near absolute zero

I await with a true faith my certain return to the everlasting, unified formless from which I sprang

Black light shall always illuminate the empty dream during my eternal sleep without any awakening

Blessed with the absolute certainty of the inescapable, feature-free timelessness, I can rest at ease

Secure that I will never know any boundaries since I cannot ever again require any space at all

So briefly swept together to the top of this black tsunami, so soon to tumble back alone into its abyss

Maybe enough time to internalize the darkness before I am once again homogenized within it

I’m freed from their false choices regarding the multitude of worn-out and bogus, one-true-saviors

The infinite, conscious-free emptiness will instantaneously absorb and totally dilute my phony soul

The effects of my puny actions will hyperbolically approach nothing throughout whatever eternity

And the void already stands limitless - outside this one, always-expanding current universe

Philosophical arguments blow away with evaporating logic, imagination, thought and memories

I am assured of complete equality with all my brothers – criminal, rich, powerful, crippled or poor

Nothing makes no promises nor seeks any false bargain for the worthless faith of my fictional soul

The black is so much cleaner than their smoke, costumes, ceremonies, props, legends and lectures

I await an absolutely smooth and pointless, totally insensate and memory-free eternal peace

Don’t have any lavishly embellished myths or inane fictional heavens to appease my childish fears

I content myself with the promise of a conscious-free infinity, passing beyond my absent notice

And god’s so-called messengers here on earth are but transparently-comedic hustlers to me

Don’t have to choose to mortgage my fictional soul so I, too, never fret over attaining paradise

Praise be to that black light off the non-cognitive and permanent emptiness where I truly belong

But, I am no atheist given my absolute and unshakeable faith in my onrushing, permanent oblivion

For, indeed, I do believe in a totally peaceful, if un-sensed, eternity - without any wants or needs

Count me among the faithful for I firmly accept that the everlasting oblivion awaits us all

The Everlasting Night

So soon now I lay me down to sleep forever

Never again to wake up together

An eternal night is how it will seem

But in all that time, not a single dream

Suns grow cold and beliefs forsaken

And through it all, I will not awaken

Years in billions pass by uncounted

With all my senses fully blunted

Wont be resting on some fairy cloud

Aren’t any noises that are too loud

Never gonna be either hot or cold

No more worries about getting old

There’s no alarms that I could hear

Not one old fear can reappear

Memories no longer get me upset

For now there’s nothing to forget

No news can bring me any grief

I rest so secure with no beliefs

Wont wake up when you roll over

Got no problem staying clean and sober

Can’t decide to trade rhyme for reason

Not concerned with form or function

Wont be scared of background silence

Don’t feel one pang of nagging conscience

All my thoughts so long since faded

Effects of my actions all fully dissipated

A few molecules of me swirl in the dust

Though I, too, swore ‘In God We Trust’

No more trying to save time

No career ladder left to climb

Don’t remember when I fell asleep

Wont wake up with the creeps

Now I’m bound to miss eternity

But there’s nothing more can ever bother me

Delivered from each and all my cares

Never to awaken, and no more nightmares

Finding My True Place In The End

Take a deep breath, at least one of the molecules entering your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. Enrico Fermi

There will still be a place for me amid the inorganic and the inanimate

Taking part in the complex cycles of the atmosphere here on earth

Cycling with the moon as she waxes and she wanes

Flowing with the tides in steady and peaceful respirations

Falling with the gentle rain from clouds of mist above the valleys

Crashing on a rocky shore with no one there to see

Carried upon the wind that always blows across the southern ocean

Inhaled by the plants in one form and respired in another

Circulating deep within the ocean around the globe for many centuries

Exposed with the dancing motes of dust backlit by a shaft of sunlight

Thrust up with the mountains built during vast tectonic plate collisions

Flowing with many different rivers through long inter-glacial epochs

Glowing with the northern lights in the star-filled Antarctic sky

Part of me in the rolling dawn and sunset that travel around the world

Ingested by the plant eaters and left behind to nourish wildflowers

Breathed in by living organisms to become part of them as well

Reacting in the upper atmosphere with the sunlight that sustains

Escaping into the quieter reaches where the planet’s gravity is not measured

Subducted down below the earth’s crust to flow up again with the liquid magma

Part of some few molecules in certain raindrops of every passing storm

Refracted briefly in a rainbow visible from one empty spot on the desert floor

Locked for centuries in the bogs or for millennia in coal deposits

Merging with the sun when it grows to claim us in its old age

Rippled by the passing of the cosmic background energy

Falling as snow and merging with the icecap for a thousand centuries

Rising with the smoke of countless burning fires

Riding with the earth around the sun, through the milky way, across the universe

Part of the biology of your sorrow and the chemicals released in your laughter

In one layer of stone finally exposed once more to the morning’s light

Helping conduct the voices of the birds and the calling of the insects

Freezing up as winter darkens, gliding down with the falling leaves

Blind chemicals from me reacting in someone’s creation of a work of genius

Consciousless but swirling, in those patterns perceived only by the living

Busy with the cycles of the inorganic and the radiations of the life force

Part of me was part of them and will be part of you as well as all of this

Pilgrimage To Infinity

It’s a long journey that I will not be taking

          It’s a big trip for which I do not need to pack

There are far-off destinations that I won’t ever see

          There are wondrous times coming that I will never know

There are uncounted eons past of which I have no memory

          There shall follow infinitely more, all just the same to me

It’s a long journey I am not undertaking

          It’s a trip lasting forever, leaving without me

It’s a pilgrimage to infinity which I make as unrelated molecules

          It’s the bonfire of the life force in which I sparked so briefly

There is wondrous beauty on billions of worlds I cannot know

          There are fascinating creatures that I will never catalogue

It’s a great journey I prepare not to be a part of

          It’s the only real voyage, but I must leave the group

Just as I fall aside so does our kind become separated

          Just as I am remerged so must this species re-enter the void

It’s an omni-directional profusion I will no longer observe

          It’s a hopeless sacred struggle in which we all must simply perish

It’s an epic journey in which there are no chapters named

          It’s a nonsensical contradiction to entropy and darkness

There is no knowable destination on this personal voyage of discovery

          There are endless connections whose richness I will not feel

Just as gravity lessens with distance, so fade my actions over time

        Just as some functions never quite reach zero, our influences must ever remain

It is a great river that casts us to the shore and moves on without malice

          It is necessarily more than just oblivious to my brief awareness

It’s a long journey in even the least promising directions, all at once

          It’s a trip with temporary passengers and no conscious destination

         

It’s a long journey that I won’t be taking but there is nowhere that I might remain behind

In Just A Few Billion Years

In a couple of billion years what you have done is still not going to matter

After the sun grows cold and has long ago given off its last photons

Well after our star has swallowed this blue planet in a thrombolitic swelling

When the last geological epoch ended much earlier in an unrecorded history

Even the last fossil has long since disappeared without a trace

And our succoring atmosphere escaped sometime in some distant past

In just a few billion years all the ripples from your thoughts merge into nanonymity

Death will no longer have a presence in our solar system

And I just bet you will still be up there relaxing in heaven with jesus and mohammed…

After the milky way has grown old and merged with other galaxies

When the life force no longer travels with our beloved Sol

Our earlier history can still be seen from several billion light years away

In a couple billion years all your rules will be long in their rightful places

Forever after the oceans boil away, the story of life on earth goes untold

Our shallow graves have been vaporized for human eons no one counted

Universal truths, discoveries and morals wait unused and without volition

When any injustices inflicted have long since had nothing to affect

The grace achieved from suffering gave way to the yet organic but now interstellar

In a few billion years our collective unconscious shares no memories

Probing life forms cannot discern the slightest trace of our existence

All our trash is at last truly recycled and diffused to the density of outer space

Long after the subjective ceases and the objective is no longer measured

The life force blossoms sentience once again for other creatures to briefly ponder

And you watch it all from somewhere off in a gloriously painted baroque heaven…

In a couple billion years, geo-years will disappear as the earth ceases to orbit

Time can be marked for a while by the dead sun’s journey round our galaxy

Unceremoniously our foolish actions and beliefs evaporate and attenuate

Our chaotic signals diffuse across space, merging with the cosmic background

And all the information that we ever had is still there - but quite still and unknown

Lo, after uncountable universes come and go you still dwell in that gilded heaven…

In a few billion years our effects will cease rippling the cosmic pond forever

The inexorable march of entropy renders our miniscule labors moot

And all of this can be sensed in the space between these two simple breaths

The Beckoning Void

to say good night and wish goodbye

          to give thanks to all and pay respects

to slip out quietly beneath the stars

          to join once more with that magic void

to part as friends and go our ways

          to leave the party very early

to paddle out upon a peaceful sea

          there to slowly cross time’s horizon

to leave each other and those we love

          to find ourselves at home no more

to loose our grasp and free our minds -

          to the dusty cosmic background

to humbly bow as the curtain falls

          to relinquish the observer

to be upon that rider-less horse

          to merely complement the light

to kindly smile to no real purpose

          to leave behind a type of joy

to know the way having never been

          to follow others, but all alone

to fly right out of inner space

          to pass beyond and cast no shadow

to dream no more

          but neither to awaken

to evaporate a lifetime

          a blossom falling from a tree

to leave the bench and slowly walk

          time to join the wind that scatters

Nothing Can Do All Of This

        Everything in the universe comes out of Nothing – Tao Te Ching     
          nothing can prepare you for the afterlife among the stars

nothing can make you understand the meaning of a billion years

nothing can change the speed with which you return to cosmic dust

          nothing can teach you more than you knew when you were born

          nothing can only calm you if you ignore nothing at all

nothing can stop the decay that is your sacred birthright

nothing can defeat you even though there will never be a battle

          nothing can persuade you more completely than nothing at all

          nothing can hide you if there is nothing left of you to see

nothing can protect you since you remain here quite willfully

nothing can be part of you before well you learn to think

          nothing can hurt you if you hold on to it too tightly

          nothing can be forgotten until it is finally time to go

nothing easily assumes the place of everything you know

nothing can disappoint you when you still have expectations

          nothing can satisfy you given enough time and distance

          nothing can convince you that you have had too much

nothing can destroy you before you understand

nothing can identify you from the other faces in the crowd

          nothing can hypnotize you if you look it in the eyes

          nothing can delay you when you are in a hurry

nothing can be left alone if you really think about it

nothing can feel the same once you have it realized

          nothing can spoil the dreams of even the evangelical

          nothing can escape even the keenest of vision

nothing can evade the collective wisdom of the tribe

nothing can ignore the strength of our beliefs

          nothing can help you in your lonely vision quest

          nothing can relieve all of this earthly suffering

nothing can be counted on to be there in the end

nothing can reveal that for which we seek

          nothing can remove the sin they say emerged with birth

          nothing can cleanse us after all the sins of our lives

nothing can console us once we have lost it all

nothing can please those which nothing satisfies

          nothing can change our lives if we simply recognize it