Who the hell do you think you are?

You’re nobody, just like me –so stop

You’re not any better than I am

so don’t sing it to the rooftop.

It’s lonely at the top of a pile of nobodies

croaking that you’re somebody unique

beating your own drum, rat-a-tat-tat

for the invisible audience that you seek.

What, I think, makes me euphoric 

The day seemed so meteoric

Soared so swiftly 

Felt so lastingly 

Let's light on a second time 

Somewhere between earth and the blue 

Let me be the pearl has fallen 

Sat on roses like a dew

Flew back to heavens

Companied with the billow

...and take wings back to you

You are a basis of the human consciousness. You can transform into anything simply by taking pieces of yourself and adding them together to create any linear combination imaginable. You can be anger, hatred, love and joy. You can be war or peace, justice or manipulation. You can be the difference between life and death. You can reduce to zero and spend days experiencing your own dissipation, and yet you can never be empty. There is always the possibility of turning right around to multiply by a different number, becoming one million times the spirit you ever believed you could be. The dimensionality of your mind cannot be reduced to any subset you try and use to define yourself. You are infinite.

This charred reality 

A day of flames

Consciousness 

For all its mystery 

Stories upon stories 

A city and its fate 

The individual 

The desperation to choose 

Air

Oxygen 

Beyond the broken glass 

Death still yet

The only option 

To trade 

To own 

Freedom 

Free falling grace 

You took flight on a Tuesday 

Arms back 

Wind in your face 

I've always wondered, am I that brave

"We saw jumpers... choosing to die" ~ The Guardian  

The last exit could be your escape to whatever better future you have planned for yourself. The last exit can lead off to another road that leads to another but each road becomes easier, less grueling, more rewarding. Remember the last exit doesn’t mean it is the end of your journey, it can mean so many things to YOU. So just follow through, friend. Follow through.

Taking the turn, I trip and clap into a group of metal trash bins. The landing wasn't so graceful, as everything has gone everywhere without the least bit tranquility. I gaze around to find my best escape. The night's a beautiful one, there's one plus. The brick walls encasing these alleyways crack and crumble to their exposure of nature's elements. The left half of my face, where I attempted to turn, is illuminated by a light blue. The source is coming from the lights perching over a door. They say nothing, just three light blue squiggles.

I look down the way I came from just in time to see the two who have been chasing me. Both are cloaked in black, sporting a ski mask for each. One is bouncing a crowbar in his left hand, while the other is carrying a silver pistol. I doubt they're selling cookies, or probably anything I'll be interested in. So I pick my sprawled ass up and dart for the blue squiggles. Getting to the door, I notice a steel box screwed over the door handle. I try to pull the handle when the box opens.

"Please place thumb."

"What?" I look to my right, the men are just now getting to the turn.

"Please place thumb."

No time. I plant my thumb on the black screen inside of the opened box. I feel a bit of heat followed by a prick. The men are running to me. The door unlatches. I pull the door as one grabs my arm. I yank back. My face meets his other arm. Well, almost, because my face actually meets the weight of the crowbar. I slap to the ground. I pull my head up to see the pair, one readying his gun. Bastards want to kill me! I check my surroundings again. Debris, lots of it, everywhere, including the trash bins. The squiggle line door perched half open. Again, a beautiful night, ah...

I jump for a lid then frisbee it at the men. The gunner is thumped in the head and I would of cracked up had my life not been in crisis. His wits are coming back and I still haven't found my exit. The door! I lurch behind it, but grope to find no handle. I hide behind it until I decide where I'll go next. Inside the building is too dark to see. Then gunfire echoes. Before my ears can adjust a buzzer goes off. The squiggly blue lines above my door go red. I'm about to peek over the door when it kicks, as if it fired a cannon. The kick grabs my shoulder and spins me face-planting into concrete.

I pull myself to my feet, again, to see the two men. They're on the ground, baked. I mean, incinerated! I go back to the door, but it slammed shut when it kicked. It now has a fresh bullet hole, but the entire door is giving off a hot glow. I pull the handle, box opens.

"Please place thumb."

I place thumb. I get pricked. Door unlatches, I step one foot in. It's pitch black, I wouldn't know if the walls were an inch or a mile away. I step my right foot in, the door follows with a slam. I freeze. Seconds pass. I'm dead, why am I exploring? I take a blind step forward. As my foot taps the ground, the room fills with a light blue

"Welcome to UVA."

"Consider a rolling of the dice," Carl Sagan murmured while rolling another blunt.

Neil deGrasse Tyson pulled deep on the smoldering remnants of his roach speculating the forthcoming conversation.

“Consider a rolling of the dice,” Sagan began again, “on this plane, in this universe, this version of yourself you roll a three - but there are six sides to a die and the other five sides are rolled by you in five completely different parallel universes other than our own.” He took a long hit and exhaled six different smoke rings illustrating his point.

Tyson’s bushy mustache and mouth turned up into grin while his eyelids drooped, deeply pondering. “'Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.'”

Sagan’s head nodded in slow agreement, “That’s what I’m saying.”

“For every left turn, there is a variation of me who takes a right. That means there are infinite number of universes, and infinite versions of me. Does that make the Earth, the Universe - me, insignificant?”

“You know Neil, ‘For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.’”

“True. True…” Tyson leaned back in his chair and stared into space. He took another drag and with a long exhale he exclaimed, “If at any moment there are innumerable versions of me existing on different parallel planes - then I am immortal. For every time I die another me lives.”

“Yes. Yes,” Sagan agreed, “Don't you see? We are all immortal. The cosmos are in us. The Buddhists got it right 3 thousand years ago - you can't kill energy. ‘We’re made of star stuff.’ Even if your human body dies, you will never be dead.”

For several moments the two friends sat in silence while thoughts of the infinite swirled around their heads mixing with the smoky haze of incense and marijuana .

“Stop bogarting the blunt, Carl.”

“Sorry. Sorry. Take it.”

“Thank you.” Tyson inhaled and coughed out his next question, “Where are the aliens? With multiple and infinite universes you think the aliens would have dropped in by now. ‘Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.’”

“What? Are you serious, Neil? Of course the aliens have been here, man. They visited thousands of years ago.”

Coughing, “They did?”

“Yea. Yea. The aliens were here. The pyramids, man. You think the Egyptians and the Mayans did that alone? No, it was the aliens. They got a bad rap, but they're chill. They came to help - they’ll be back. You’ll see.”

“Carl, saying shit like that created some criticism for you by our peers.”

“Whatever, man. Those guys are close-minded. They think they know everything. ‘Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?’”

“Preach, Carl. Preach.” Tyson nodded his head in agreement and passed the blunt again. He saw a speck of dust floating in a ray of light. He fixed his gaze on this microcosm - a universe within a universe, a piece of himself - dance before his eyes. “‘Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?’”

Carl Sagan stared at Neil deGrasse Tyson with his mouth open before breaking into cackling laughter. “You are toasted, man. Toasted.”

Tyson coughed, “This is really good shit, though. Who you getting it from?”

Sagan laughed, “Bill Nye.”

“Nice.”

Tolkien's prophecy rewritten for the modern age:

All that is gold is just glitter,

No sales are worth what is lost;

The old that still works is better,

Than shiny, new stuff bought at cost. 

From a slumber the owner shall be woken,

A leak from the pipes shall spring;

A plumber shall fix what is broken,

The penniless again shall be crying. 

They all became daddy's girls

While I became my mama's princess

Now i know how that happened.

I was just a mistake to you

May be just a burden.

And I still wonder,

If it was just anger

Or your deepest wish

When you told me to slit my vein.

What you didn't know,

Was that I cried alone in school the next day

Was i really that big a mistake?

But don't worry any more

Cause I'll fly away soon

But I won't foget you

Cause I know in a way

You still do love me

I just wish you could show it.