What do I believe in?
Huh, that’s funny.
Believe.
Like I had a choice what to believe,
like a silver platter
of gleaming chances was
slapped in front of me at my birth,
and I got to pick
the tastiest of the batch.
Believe.
You’ll learn fast that nothing
is ever given to you in life,
none of these copper-colored dreams
and rosy hopes you speak of,
that reek of delusions
long rotted away.
In the real world, you have to
supply for yourself.
There’s nothing to believe in.
There’s the dirt you have
and how you sculpt it.
Nothing more.
What do I believe in?
That question again…
Yes, once I might have longed
for a greater purpose,
striven to be something of a legend.
Tell me true, don’t we all?
Don’t we all want to be the stuff of
lore, written into the undying saga
of the world, forever
to traipse across history’s pages?
Huh, greater purpose…
There is nothing greater than what there is-
the stones and the sky and the sea,
and the thoughts in your head.
I long discarded my greater purpose,
and kicked my potential to the wind.
My ambitions darkened as the
tempest teemed with dust.
I don’t believe in anything,
because nothing is fixed.
You’re born and you live
and you die, and your corpse
becomes another man’s garden,
the dirt that he will build his house upon.
What is there to dream of
when your greatest purpose
is to mold a stranger’s bones,
and then abandon your
skin for the worms?
There is nothing but the
darker purpose and those
who reject it.
Nothing more.
I’ve been experimenting a lot with character types lately. Obviously, the narrator of this poem is more than your average “the glass is half empty” kind of guy. For some reason, I’ve always been fascinated with characters who are considered the darker, antagonist-types. Not necessarily villains- but not a hero by any means. I don’t know; there’s just some kind of appeal they have on me, like I want to delve into their minds and discover their motives. If it’s not clear, I wrote this poem from the point of view of a particular character I’ve been working on, so it doesn’t display my own views in any sense!
Stellular Scribe 