Imagine, if you will,
During the duration of this poem,
That you are an option.
None of us exist.
We are potential.
You are simply a choosing thing without a body, without a world, without a past.
You have a choice.
Exist or refrain.
Be or don't.
All you have are the capacities for analysis. The ability to distinguish thoughts and values without the remotest semblance of a feeling or effect. But you know everything about what life could be. You have been given a tutorial which captured every experience and hit you with it like a cascading tsunami of emotion.
So here is the question.
Do you choose to exist?
On what basis do you make this choice? What is it that could make you decide that life is worth choosing.
I'm not asking whether life is worth living or not. We exist. Period. Deal with it. But what I want to know is what, in the tumultuous chaos of our emotional hurricane of painful, beautiful, life-crushing and sometimes life-affirming existence, would make it worth choosing if we were given that privilege. Imagine if it makes you more comfortable that this state of non-existence is simply the most pure and blissful state of zen and peace you could ever find yourself in.
Now... Do you choose life or not?
Do you choose to endure all of the mess and mayhem?
You love poetry... It uplifts your being and drapes the world of your life in total affirmation..
But that's after the fact.
Do you choose to live in order to be a poet or read and listen to poems?
You love things. Some of them make life worth living but what actually would make life worth choosing?

Let's consider some sides here.

On the one hand.
Life is injustice. Life is pain. Heartache. Loss. Struggle. Labor. Toil and trouble. Dying. Anxiety. Depression. Oppression. Illness. Poverty. Hunger. Hopelessness. Delusion. Fear. Loneliness. Noise.

I love the movies of Terrence Malick but I wouldn't choose all the above so I could occasionally watch those.. . would I?

If I am to be a poet... I am obligated to find something that answers this question in the positive.

What do I live for?
I live for the moments when the sun breaks the clouds as if to tell me that the beautiful moments can shatter all shadows cast upon us.
Those split seconds when stars explode inside her eyes.
The subtle ways she moves her body.


I guess I'm saying I refuse.
I pass the burden.
I guess I'm saying I live for you.
So it's up to you to answer this question. Otherwise, all you can do is find someone to live for.

I suppose I'm saying we live for each other.
And so, as long as you choose Yes to that question. I'll choose it too.

If you go first.
I'll follow you into the dark.
How couldn't I?
I belong to you.


Nietzsches ghost lingers like a spectre on the horizon of an eternal recurrence..

Would I, through all of this, will that this life be live again endlessly? Every moment. All the mayhem.

I don't know.
But I could joyfully that you would exist forever.
The eons in between are but a brief intermission.
The universe needs time to digest what you are.


[If you are intrigued by this idea, find and read a copy of Christine Korsgard's "Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value. That article influenced my thinking for this poem].