Who laughs last when the flag’s at half mast?
As the pop of a bursting ember
flickers through a fire,
my desire
beams across the frosty morning air.
I stare
out on a world with no one there.
I don’t care.
Alone, I dare venture
to bear the dead winter
amongst all our remnants:
splintering cement
structures—
solitary,
like me.
I move through them carefully,
gazing back
past the vast badlands and emptiness
which persists throughout this desolate wilderness,
in an attempt to fathom what comes after it:
Beyond the boundary of the infinite.
When within this vision
an image flashes back:
a reminisced rendition of life lived last
that bears my exact resemblance.
As I attempt to comprehend this—
to grasp its distant essence—
it becomes a new extension of the bundle of impressions
which constructs my soul’s existence.
I am it.
It is true.
I’m in it.
It’s in me too.
But inevitably
it slips away,
like everything
evaporates
to the abyss from whence it came,
perhaps to re-emerge someday
as a flicker in a flame,
burst forth from some ember,
or else in some other way.
The glory of fame that remains,
or honor living on in a name,
amounts to the same thing as lacking these,
once the flickering flames fade away.