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In Your Grave

You are now,
This atomic instance of measurable pain,
In your grave.
Cozy and warm.
While the rest of the believers,
Above the fertile, green grass
Delight in the belief that, you
Who have departed,
Are instead with God.
While spiritualists, politicians,
Dreamers and fools,
Concoct a familiar brand of nonsensical stuff –
Affectation – which makes the world turn,
Yesterday, today, and always.
You remain in your quiet grave.
Vanity and hypocrisy soar – high
With silver wings,
As lovers walk
Hand in hand,
In the park,
Directionless.
“What now?” they intimate,
Like ghosts seeking incarnation.
Infants cry at midnight, darkness choking them.
This,
While drums beat lonely rhythms out of animal skins.
Toddlers play kiddy games half a world away,
Deep within the entrails of a godforsaken town,
Another world, this
While you remain in your insulated grave.
You took with you
A cynical smile, the like of:
“I know better, you cannot fool me with your…
Foolish games, designed for sophomoric minds.
You cannot fool me, try as you may.”
Perpetual fire burns in a distant star
Ninety-three million miles away.
This,
Above the fructuous grass, your resting place.
The same grass retired men cut low, fertilize,
To assuage the pangs of idle time.
This Earthly manicure, while
The sun,
Burning out its fuel…at an astounding rate,
Dips below the horizon, once again,
Giving birth to abysmal darkness,
Year after year –
On and on, tomorrow and tomorrow,
A signpost of eternity to come.
This weary game goes on,
Ad infinitum.
This,
A spectacle
For the visionary few,
Brave souls who dare confront reality,
With maximum effort, taking the road less travelled.
You are now in your grave,
Your newly found home.
Quiet, cozy, and warm,
As hurricanes brew in the Atlantic,
Hovering in the mid atmosphere,
Year after year,
Wrecking ships, homes, and lives along the way, as
Newborn babes are bottle fed concoctions of love and hope,
In happy homes, far and near.
Not so the cries of lonely widows,
That never resound, for
In between life, despair and death,
There are freight trains speeding by
To meet the schedule-maker’s dreams.
Planes to catch,
Long trips to take,
Supra-ultra, modern-day, important, world-shaking
Meetings to attend,
Games to play,
Calumny to fabricate,
Memories to erase,
Untruths to disseminate,
Hopes to materialize,
Holy mass to attend.
While in your grave, warmly insulated you remain,
From this and that,
What if?
What not?
Who said what about…?
All the same, here and there,
Today, tomorrow,
Yesterday and forever,
Between here, eternity… time to come.
In the grave, now and then,
Death levels all,
Rich and poor,
Weak and strong,
Dreamer and loser,
Dancer, paraplegic,
Pagan, atheist, pantheist.
Theists,
Lovers of God,
Speculate about a logical, mathematical,
Aristotelian prime mover;
A Dantesque hierarchical realm
Guided by logos, reason of the immanent.
In your grave,
You do not envy
Men above the green grass, who
Trembling with fear,
Choked by a living death,
By life and everything that is, and
Which is not,
Only imagined –
Contingencies ruled by contradictions and irony.
Between reality and imagination, the matrices of psychical form,
Essence abounds.
Dreams that cannot be.
This is man, the
Eternal fool per se,
Like a shadow past midday,
Ever growing weaker into night.
In your grave,
You gather man-besmirched,
Timeless truth:
That you are you,
I am I.
That this universe, multiverse,
Riddle-verse,
Revolves around itself,
A danse macabre of
Bright Illusions, young man’s passion.
A whirlwind, vortex of irony untold,
Upends rational principles, righteousness alike.
This perpetual dance rejuvenates itself, always
With our thick blood,
Cold, salty tears –
Metaphysical indignation.
From your warm grave,
Wise one,
Sage, lover of life,
Kosmo-naut,
You keep the score:
Lethal lessons most men cannot comprehend,
Until… too late.
“Man needs games,” you say.
From your grave, you recommend –
“Games, give them trivial games,”
You insist.
“For, what is man to do without games?”
Time goes by,
In a flash of eternity.
“Hurry, catch me,” this is time’s dictate.
“That is, if you can,
Mortal, time-keeping, sundial man.
Catch me if you can.”
Welcome to cosmic irony.
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Pedro Blas González is a Professor of Philosophy and Contributor Editor of VoegelinView. He is author of several books, the latest being Philosophical Perspective on Cinema (Lexington Books, 2022), Ortega's ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man (Algora Publishing, 2007), Unamuno: a Lyrical Essay (Floricanto Press, 2007), Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega y Gasset's Philosophy of Subjectivity (Paragon House, 2005) and Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy (Algora Publishing, 2005), and the novels, Fantasia: A Novel (2012) and Dreaming in the Cathedral (2010).

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