There comes a time when the world ends.
Sucked inside a speck of dust.
And it stays like that for untellable time.
— Bhikkhu Sujato

They no longer fool either of us, the gratuitous leaves of your platitudes, but instead they fall at my feet, more autumnal detritus to be swept away by the winds of change.

“Come,” you say, “let our intellects wrestle.”  Now the truth.

We stumble along boulevards of ideas, the two of us directed only by your wanton greed.  So much passes unnoticed.  Not by me, of course, for the silken pleasures and the heartfelt aches are mine.  Yet they matter not in the world you create for us, the world over which you rule.

Your rapt gaze falls elsewhere, toward the irrelevancies of others.  Their smallest dawns are your brightest sunrises, their every whisper a profound ringing in your ears.  And I walk alone in the shadow you cast, a puppy begging scraps dropped to keep me there.

How am I?  The question rings hollow now, finally, at last.  Its rhetoric stands as clear as glass, though it was not always so.  But then that remains true of much between us.  I needed time to see, to open my eyes wide so they might consume what is as opposed to what might be.  Emotional worth is a most potent intellectual blinder.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
— T. S. Eliot