A Separate Reality

***

There is an end.

***

It can be worshipped in glory,

Or dreaded in anguish.

It can be imagined,

Or premeditated.

Prophesized

Or anticipated.

It can be summarily thrust upon us

In an instant of enlightenment,

Or an eternity of damnation.

But,

There is no beginning.

Only an enigma,

A postulatized fiction

Of another’s account.

There is no single memory

That betrays the beginning.

No time when you say,

“This is the moment I came to be.”

That very fact

Then,

Throws doubt onto the end.

Save the anticipated coming of the end,

For love of the Gods,

Or fear of Devils,

There are only your eye witness accounts,

Or rows of headstones

To tell the shadowy tale.

But,

Think how little it has to do with you.

There can be no moment

 When you say, with certainty,

“This is the end.”

Because it must be recognized,

And if it were,

You would expound upon such an

unlikely epiphany

With absolution.

You would sing these words

from the highest mount,

***

“That was the end.”

So,

If there is no beginning,

You can personally,

 Vouch for,

And there is not a recounting

 Of the end,

Then,

What lies between is an illusion,

For,

It cannot be real

 Unless proof exists to tell us  

It is real.

There is nothing written, spoken

Or sung out in verse

To prove we exist,

Nothing more valid

Than

 What can be put forth

To prove we do not.

                                        Jeffrey B. Allen