For No Apparent Reason

Sometimes it hits me,
And suddenly I’m overwhelmed with grief and sorrow that seems to come from an unknown place within; perhaps an incarnate knowledge of terrible things to come, But what do I have to be sad about, really?…

What is this sharp pain in my chest that seems to shoot through me at stressful times, but has no substantial sorrow underneath its guise?

When I swim within this pain, I become a dark phantom,
Hiding my face in shame in the dark where every color blends into black and the reds of pain fade into dullness; forgotten.
I am a shadow for a few moments in a dark room,
What is this pain?
Maybe it comes from the mutual feeling of the depressing qualities of life?

The fact that we are born into predetermined bodies,
Awarded a set of problems and mental restraints,
That are latched onto our ankles as we trudge through our snapshot in the unending movie of life,
Where celebrities and famed killers earn a close up on the big screen of time, Where I am an extra, whose glamorous dreams will never be fulfilled,

And in the end, time will swallow me whole and I will be digested, along with the drunks, the scholars, the athletes, the nobodies…and what will become of my footprint left in the earth?…

With the wear of time, the ground will slowly chafe away until the last remnants of our existence will cease to remain,
And our children’s children will see an old photo but not recall our names,
And it all will be lost in a sandstorm, in a blizzard we will perish . . . But that’s time.

A second, a dream, gone now; everything rushing past like moving water through open hands.
We are drowning; sinking down until we can no longer see the light,
And those on the surface no longer see our bodies in the water and no longer care to look. We continue sinking down to the base of the ocean, where our bodies will lie motionless, until we are worn down to sand,

And our ashes will be the soil our children’s children will be buried in…

Infinite? We are minor, a flash of a camera.
All alike but all different,
Constantly trying to squeeze meaning out of our small lives when there might be none to contrive; striving, reaching, for what?…

I’m one of those people and none of those people, I’m not existing and existing,

Encapsulated in the quandary we call time,

I don’t know if you’ll remember me or my name or even the words I’ve written, but maybe my presence will burn in your mind for a split second . . . and when that second is over I will vanish.
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