Sleeping, do you enter eternity?

                 Your eyes closed, and feeling

the faintest echo of the stars?

                  Or is there just an endless nothing,

and nothing, and fathomless void?

Do we rush into annihilation?

                  Or are we ushered there sweetly,

discreetly?

                   With pageantry and prose, words

conspire to make it appear tolerable.

                    As if a depth of intolerable pain

and anguish should be tempered.

What is the reason?

                  To define and ritualize the inevitable?

Why can't it be free, and untethered,

                  and mysterious?

Just like falling...into blackness...