2 Poems by Christopher Heise

Lonely & Badass

In the silence of the sounds
will be found the story
of your days far away from
the love & lyrics you’ve known
like a blind bat without home
starving under the desolate order
of stars & LED streetlights
like a speck of dust in an overclean crowd
never proud of its accomplishments
always down on its luck
on purpose like a fucked duck
doesn’t-give-a-shit fool
for no good reason except
he thinks it’s cool to be
bad & lonely & badass.

Naturally No One Knows

Naturally no one knows
the nothingness that awaits us,
so we sit & simper
and hope everything will eventually
turn out OK and we’ll all
end utterly peaceful & content
& blissful when we get
to meet the Maker/
called to the Great Beyond.

And yet it’s an illusion,
isn’t it? That day will be like
this one, only dimmer & more destitute
and drawn of all substance
or semblance of meaning,
like a blind blow in the night
when your eyes don’t notice
the grandeur of the moonlit sky.

Or maybe that’s an illusion too –
this prophesied future possibility
of dereliction & demise,
this wishful imaginary destruction,
and all we truly know
is that we can never know
what will happen at the end
of our days with anything
resembling clarity,
and that having to face & feel
such stark uncertainty
is the essence of being
human.

Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, Christopher Heise is a long-term traveler and educator. He received an MLA degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his travel writing and fiction have been featured in Go World Travel Magazine, Indie Shaman and The FictionWeek Literary Review. He can currently be found somewhere in Asia.

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