Finding Truth

I crest the next hill

Overlooking a valley full of flowers;

Vibrant, vivid spectrums of light

Dancing in the gentle breeze.

On the breeze is a hint of fresh strawberry,

A sweet memory of long ago.

Why have I wakened here once more?

The shouts are muffled behind locked doors.

I pick a flower, twisting its stem gently between my fingers--

A phantom moment that seldom lingers.

Through the valley I walk,

Endless rows of nameless beauties

Stretching to infinity in every direction--

An asymptote ever so close, yet ever so far.

The moment shatters.

The glass cracks.

The valley melts like dripping wax.

Like warm flesh peeling off bare bone,

Like slipping sanity far from home.

Reverberate. Upside down.

Breathing eternity, tilted sideways

Unknown earth, shattered reality.

Tilted eternity, unknown reality

Breathing earth, shattered sideways.

Unknown eternity, breathing sideways

Tilted reality, shattered earth.

In my valley are mysterious wonders;

In my valley are beautiful creations.

But all of the flowers are fading, crumbling

Into pale phantasms, ghosts of what is

Or what could have been.

The doors unlock.

The sky spins.

The ground wavers.

Time and space break their sacred bonds

As reality crumbles with the flowers in the fields.

I reach for the last flower, a lily,

Small and alone and white in all of its fragile elegance.

In the world that I created

A figment, an illusion

Nothing is real.

But what is real is what should not exist.

Lily petals fall,

Gently sinking into the sands of eternity:

Endless, empty halls of forever.

The light grows dim

As truth falls short

And I fall.