Requiem for Myself
by Brett L. Becker
I am gone now.
Faded, paled, vanished.
Yellowed with the sweat of time.
My face dust,
My hands shriveled,
My soul drained and rinsed away.
Yet I endure, perhaps,
In musty attics in wrinkled albums among old friends.
Friends also gone.
Also faded.
I have grown tired, ragged, used up, thrown away
In the minds of all who knew me.
Loved me.
How curious that my love for them remains.
There is strength in nothing.
Power in void and emptiness.
I understand that now.
I am here, perchance, in the vacancy of all that once was.
Of all that has lived and died.
Of all thoughts and dreams long past.
Of memories forgotten.
Loves lost.
Prayers heard and answered
Or ignored.
And only false echoes remain
Like the mirage of wind after weeks becalmed.
This paradox, this infinite existence
Is brimming with nothingness.
It always is.
I am but a swirling sliver of a glimmer of
What was once a wish, a love,
A memory,
An imagined reality.
Even, possibly, I am
Was
Will be
Nothing at all.