"The Fingering Abyss" by Dimitris Voulgaris

When you’re just a void

Everything’s always fleeting

Where’d you drop your keys?

When is Monday’s meeting?

But these things are just nothings

More menial ‘mounts of minutes

What’s worse is forgetting one’s life

Can you be sure you even lived it?

I do not have amnesia

No dementia eats my mind

So why do I keep forgetting?

Why are so many left behind?

To be swallowed by the dark

Choked out into some obscurity

Lights of knowledge are stuffed out

Stealing my comforts and security

Despite it all though, I can still stomach

Forgetting both myself and my days

But I could never begin to forgive

Losing you in that blackened haze

You stood still; feet at the precipice

With darkness licking at your back

I don’t remember who you are

You’re now among their pack

Those looming shadows of my past

So easily lost within the dark

At least they’re no longer haunting me

Leaving a scorch-ed mark

It always hurts when pleasure leaves

But rest easy, pain does as well

Like living in a dark purgatory

You’re in neither heaven nor in hell

I remember this paper 

Thinking “Hey I’ll start a poem”

But it’s too dark to read it now 

Where did my mind once roam?

Was it about a love long gone?

Or about nature’s beautiful woe?

Did it have a meter or a scheme?

I really just don’t know

I live down here, deep in that abyss

With scattered papers all strewn around

Who am I? What are these?

It seems questions are the only sound

But they do not echo across the walls

Am I blind? Am I deaf?

I do not know. I’ll never know.

Is this life or is it death?