the real loss

~ a poem about living

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. 
The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” 
~ Norman Cousins

Death is not the real loss

Death is a flow
Death is life’s real cost
Death is how we know.

An awareness of endings
Stems the tides

To know isn’t all
To kill is to fall.
But to exist, righteously, isn’t rising.

the choice between choices has always been
the selfish design of conscious minds
and we inhabit them no matter what the outcome.

And the reasons which carve out the path are akin to the dreams of an indefinite sleeper,
residing within a cold deathless bliss
Beckoning this ghost within the machine,
We are existing but only just so.

For they
(the reasons why we do all of this)
mark an end based in the shifting sands of entropic mortality.

we desperately wish to move beyond
precisely where we cannot venture.
this feeling is damning.

We are these components, these little decisions, of how and what to consider; in living we slowly grind ourselves down, deeper and darker, existing but just so, less and less; these moments slipping deeper within ourselves, our environments, our materials, but further from the Truth of real being.

And in all of this, we change. We change and iterate, and slowly but surely fall into something, outside of it all.
Never formed; Always becoming.
Something that is different than before. Less than what all of this should be.

We, existing now outside the natural world, are controlled by constituents within systems we have created; our machinations shaped by machines we have built.

Man is born anew, a new being for a new world; and in this world we have fashioned for ourselves, we are lesser.

Being becomes boring.

And this existence, the revelation of what all of it is, of what it all really means — dies and dies slowly, unknowingly.

Death is not the real loss in life.

It is what dies inside of us whilst we live.

That is the real loss.