- Flux Magazine
"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?