Slow Fade- A Poem

You’ve made it all much easier

The cherry-picked nature of life

That even now on the precipice

On the ledge of your amorphous goals

You stagger along the drop of what still might be

Petrified by who you are, who you’ve been, and where you’ll go.

Your feet kick small stones into oceans

Tumbling down as a boulder that cracks

With the force of a world-killing meteor

That it might as well be for all I have left

There’s the waterfall splash of a cannonball

The empty embrace of childhoods imagined

We’re standing at the edge of a balcony racked

By indecision, by a pitiful fear, by an unavoidable path.

And I think I know the truth of it all

I’m almost positive this might be it

For all the little moments I’d swear that I’ve lived

There’s never been anything quite as close

Quite as real

As this towering drop beneath my feet so surreal

That I’d think it could be anything but

The beckoned bellow of a life claimed once and for all

As a new home, a better place, a heeded call.

So this man stands outstretched

His arms so much like mine

A pathetic approximation of something most have thought divine

But he’s nothing more than a terrified child

Who sees at long last the strange darkness in new paths

That whisper great truths and even greater lies

For the sake of one last great harvest

Greater hopes and dreams that beget

Something more than a reality’s too-brief descent

Toward all that might be more beginning than an end

It’s all an endless promise

A beckoned call that haunts the moments

That stitched together build a single human life

And for all that we think might have been

For all that we still are

We stand still in a breeze, still at the brink, ever too afraid to fall.

The path that brought me here

As this man I can’t remember

I swear there’s a chance I’ve never seen him even once before

Has only once been simple and a privilege

To feel such pain that fades like day

Disappearing into strange dark things until

They come crawling back again

But what a joy they say it is to be me

What a gift that I’ve been given

Stuttered and uttered by an ignorant horde

That stand aghast at the base of a mountain so vast

Staring up

Staring up where I’ll still stand

And they’ll ask in time the cause of it all

The purpose of a plummeting depth

But they won’t have the right questions or the thoughts

Now descending

Past stable sturdy grounds where they stand

Wondering blankly as they will always do

For the sake of bolstered ineptitude

As foolish men who don’t even know what art could be.

I’m sure they’ll say

Well… a lot of things

And even a broken life is right twice a day

But there’s something not quite wrong about falling

A comfort sung as a fragile life recording

About how that drop would ring of regret

Between the eighth and seventh floor

But that’s the strangest thing about life

About dreams, about our odd human plea

That we might know just what’s worth dying for

And it’s a hope

It really is, it’s a guess to overshadow what might’ve been

If we’d only chosen something more than what we are

But there’s a silence at the bottom

Where even in daylight the men are drifting

Far from the depths into which we’ve dived

Because even then the spectacle’s fading

Like a dead man hesitating

Rather than embracing something more than a status quo

And even as I’m sinking in my ocean thoughts self-defeating

There’s a bliss of falling past what’s already gone

And even if the lights are dimming

Even if i’ve lost it all

There’s alway just the slightest chance

That I’m swimming

That in the end I’m drifting out past your finite pier

Far from who I might’ve been and farther from who you are

And for all you thought I might’ve been

Perhaps I’m gone but I’m still here.