He had felt a deep sense of loss during
the past year, as if a part of him were dying,
and so he had stepped up the writing, which gave
him such joy, in an attempt to stifle the sadness.
But even as the words grew, so did the
darkness. He did not realize that it was because
he was a newfound poet in the Age of the Death
of Poetry, finding God as He takes His final breath,
discovering Paradise just as its flora begins to wither
and its ground to sink into the sea, reaching
Nirvana just as eternity begins to collapse
in upon itself. And so he wrote and read and
rhymed with all his heart, always feeling a
vague sense of doom lurking on the edge of
his consciousness, but never realizing that it was
the sound of his soul slowly suffocating as
the vital stanzas were driven from the world
by a spreading plague of apathy.
1995