Is it the truth that souls live on
beyond the buried flesh?
Or just a myth to drug weak hearts
with hope for something else?
When fingers of the one we love
ease our eyes shut forever,
when our last day blots out the light
of days that lay ahead,
and the grim urn has sealed away
the ash that was our self,
can we not give our being up
in the grave's gift of d**h?
Are we, poor things, condemned to live
through more existence yet?
Or is d**h something absolute,
no fraction of us left
when our soul, like a burst of air
commingling overhead
with vaporous and fleeting clouds,
flees with our last gasped breath
and the cremation torches' tongues
have licked our naked flesh?
All that the Sun sees on its rise
or in its setting glow,
all that the Sea's blue billows wash
with global ebb and flow,
is pulled by Pegasus-swift Time
doomward. All things must go.
As the cyclonic cosmos' whirl
the Zodiac we see,
and Sun, the Lord of Stars, spins out
the roll of centuries,
and Moon in witching orbit's arc
speeds to Her destiny,
as all things extant go the way
they must go, so do we.
He who has reached the stagnant waves
of Styx, the Netherstream
where gods are sworn to ceaseless truth,
has simply ceased to be.
As smoke from sputtering fire, we soil
the atmosphere, then fade.
As the rain-pregnant clouds you see
first darken the blue day
are scattered by the sudden Northwind's
chill blasts, then dissipate,
the souls that rule our flesh will flow
apart without a trace.
For there is nothing after d**h
and d**h is not a state
only the finish line of this
swift existential race.
Lay down your greed for a reward,
your fears of punishment.
When greedy Time and gnashing Chaos
devour us, we just end.
For d**h can be no partial thing.
When it destroys the flesh
it nullifies the soul. There is
no afterlife, no Hell,
no hellhound guardian at the gates
to block escape attempts,
no savage tyrant Lord who rules
the kingdom of the dead.
These are no more than hollow folktales
unworthy of attention,
fragments of fantasy and myth
turned nightmare and deception.
You ask "where will we go when we
are dead forevermore?"
You'll be with the unborn.