Residue trailing an attempt at change.

I pull away from the mirror,
with these thoughts echoing in the image that fades but cannot look away:

Think with your heart, self, and cease
haunting your world of compromises,
which linger still within your best intentions, mocking you, self, from the irises bird-like attentiveness, the pupils like a door in the sky
opening, closing . . .
Listen, self, to the voice within.

You have always been alone with your illusions, a weather watcher, and Time keeps its gaze on you, like a ghost
hovering in the Infinite, accelerating
as it expands. The dreams of youth,
self, and the terror of the middle years, fall away like winter leaves --
with brittle urgency.

Where did the dreamer go, dear self?
The life-plan; faceless friends, nameless, singular, objective,
abandoning your thoughts
as they abandoned their own.

Time is laughing at your confusion.
See, self, the fire in the darkness,
fueled by the friction of your failures, and by what may yet
come to be. Accept this moment, self,
and enhance your sorcery
by dying before your death.

Transmute this simple hour --
a glacier of Self inhaling creation,
and exhaling its artifacts
of transformation. For Creation
never ends.

Know yourself from that station,
and seek out a better version --
you who will never find a place
to hide, nor be given that which you
most fear.
Let this be your immortality.

Surrender, self,
for what shame is there
in bowing with your dignity intact?
Victory lives in this.

Surrender to your victory and your loss, you, dear traveler, who are both
everything and nothing.

You may yet attain a glorious
and noble death.