what one person is to many
many are to the dream
which
we must keep alive at all cost

even if your family hates you
and you walk across the tundra
and the sound of the permafrost
cracking mixes with the sound
of your brittle bones cracking
and the radiating karma melts
your skin as it falls off your
body all so that the tiny sputtering
flickering flame you hold in
your hands does not go out

the very idea of such fills
you with anxiety and sadness too
profound for you to speak about
as a thought too scary for you
to even acknowledge as it dances
across the inside of your brain

that the dream which you would not
wake yourself to leave may have
been a bad thing all along and
therefore the many may have been
needlessly cast aside and even
the one,
oh the one,
you that is,
the one even down to the way you
opened your door and said hi
to your neighbor could have actually
been the all important thing

and damn the flame and damn the carrying
of it over the mountains and through
the woods and across the tundra
and then burping up in the consolatory
idea that you’d known you would think
this when the light begins to dim

because what is there to do but question
what you had done before when the
outcome is so grim but your heart knows
that the bargain you made with yourself
the devil,
that is,
inside of yourself
was a forfeit and bad one and now you are
here at the edge of the earth looking
a zombified mess holding this little
pathetic idea in your head with a new kind of
sadness

a new kind of cry
a new kind of tear
drips down your cheek
and extinguishes the flame

you hear a new voice inside you
whisper so gently that
after all this time, you’ve finally made it
but every cell inside of you is painfully aware of
a secret truth which underpinned everything
and that you always knew and now know even more

that it is too late