Just Seconds To Go, But I Never Knew

My time becomes more precious the more I realize just how very little remains to me

After so much wasted racing towards unspecified and forgotten goals, I must pause to look about

At last I can refuse foolish siren calls to empty work and mindless entertainment

More precious still these moments as things grow ever more serious at every important juncture

I am forced to look behind the curtains and beyond the well-dressed entertainers

I have to forget about the next sports season and peer into that empty but everlasting void

Though others stand beside me, we all know I follow this course quite alone

There awaits an event that will never end for me and so very little time remains

I look up to distant galaxies or my gaze falls upon an ancient fossil, and I am already gone

I close my eyes, hold my breath, stop my thoughts and I am filled with all that I will ever know

Memories buzz around like pesky flies but they, too, will disappear right along with me

Dreams come to me in waking hours and I stare blankly into the dark of night

I realize now how the effects of any action quickly fade into that cosmic background noise

But I have not spent 1% of my infinitesimal time slot on what might really matter

With only seconds to go, I am way behind and have no way to stop the clock

At least the incessant, foolish prattling of our daily lives can finally be ignored

For now all I see in their ads and entertainment is just a hiding from the truth

All the short-lived satisfactions of the fads simply mask the onrush of that vast unknowable

Our small victories in our petty squabbles reflect but our mere nervousness as we stand in line

My mind fails in attempts to imagine the unavoidable eternal dark unconscious

So soon our species short interlude on earth won’t be discernible from my own lifespan

Just seconds to go as my finite heartbeats toll in a cold and mindless countdown

And in a much, much shorter time this briefest chirp will cease again, once and for all

My dead senses will no longer feed my lifeless brain the data it has always craved

From this perspective our routines dissolve into wanton, pointless fools play

Yet in the irresistible current, near the vast dark abyss, I grasp futilely for simple normalcy

So quickly there will be no one to read such words as these, which exist no longer