The Last Rider
He arrives unheralded, as all endings do,
with the velvet tread of centuries ground to dust beneath unnumbered shoes,
Shrouded in night’s inheritance,
faceless beneath a cowl woven from centuries of silence,
stitched with the prayers of the dying—He carries neither blade nor flame,
no scythe to glint nor torch to claim,
His weapon is absence, a soft erasure, and the promise that every name, in the end,
is worth exactly the same.Where he passes, the candles gutter,
the air grows lean,
Unsaid goodbyes drift in corners, old regrets congeal unseen,
He is not the beast, not the famine, not the blood-borne war,
He is the hush after suffering, the closing of every door.
No need for a trumpet, no bellow, no march; he’s patient as rot,
He is the blank page after every story,
the silence memory forgot.He comes to the
battlefield once the screaming is spent,
Kisses the brow of the dying,
accepts surrender in breath and lament.He moves
through hospitals—his footfalls softer than morphine,
Drawing the final curtain for the lovers and the fiends,
Old men with medals, infants untouched by sin—He is the coin on the eyelids,
the hand drawing the chin.
He rides between worlds, past and future both blind,
A witness to every secret, a reader of the mind.The doomed see his shadow
before his form appears,
They feel the chill in their marrow,
the hum of ending years.He waits in the threshold, where lovers part,
Listens to last confessions, the stuttering heart.The mother’s hand clutching air,
the soldier’s empty plea,
The sigh of the priest whose faith could not set him free.
He is patience incarnate, never hunting,
never lost—For time itself is his only cost.Empires collapse,
and kingdoms decay;He walks the same pace,
unmoved by decay.He’s the last face of royalty,
the hush in a beggar’s cell,He’s the breath between questions,
the truth that stories tell.His realm is the hospice,
the back seat of rusted cars,The eyes of the lost as they count their scars.
No banners herald his reign, no crowns forged for his brow,
He sits on no throne, yet all will bow.For he is the equalizer,
the end to all pride,
The eraser of fortune, the place secrets hide.He does not barter,
nor beg for a tear,
He is both dreaded and holy, familiar
and queer.His shadow stretches from tombstones to neon signs,
Wherever life flickers, his presence aligns.
He is memory’s erasure, the archivist of grief,
He takes what is borrowed, grants no relief.He
listens for lullabies sung through cracked lips,
And carries their melodies into eternal eclipse.His touch is not cruel—just certain,
profound,
He’s the silence after thunder, the seed in the ground.He does not judge,
does not care for remorse,
He rides the final circuit, unalterable course.
He watches as lovers weep, as fathers rage at the sky,
He is the reason children ask, “Why?”Yet he does not answer,
for answers are vain,
He is the closing refrain.He sits in the darkness behind every vow,
Knowing all hope ends in silence,
somehow.And when candles burn low and breath is a thread,
He lingers, then gathers the dead.
He slips through ruins, beneath marble and mud,
Whispers beneath the pulse, the stutter of blood.He
is the final truth in a world full of lies,
The cost behind bargains, the toll when love dies.Cities abandoned,
fields where nothing will grow,
He collects the endings, moves slow.Famine and war may break bone and will,
But he alone teaches that time stands still.
He gathers the last of the songs, the memory in the stone,
He is what remains when all others are gone.He’s the ghost in the chapel,
the shudder in sleep,
The weight of the promise nobody will keep.He claims the kings in their halls,
the paupers in rain,
Without malice, without pain.The world grows quiet as he passes by,
Stars blink out, night deepens, even hope will die.
He takes nothing but breath, leaves nothing but stillness,
He is the echo of prayers, the absence,
the illness.He’s the empty chair at the family meal,
The faded photograph, the missing feel.He gathers the shadows
and closes each eye,
With a touch softer than wind, a sigh.When he departs, there’s no mark,
no scar—Just endless horizon, and night without star.
He is the last rider—final, unnamed,
Shadows unfurl at the call of his claim.He closes the circle, undoes every bind,
And in his quiet, every soul findsAn end without noise, a peace without cheer,
The softest hush that settles here.He is not cruel or kind—simply the void,
The keeper of endings, where all things are destroyed.
He comes in silence, swallows the light,
Folds all the suffering back into night.He is the hush, the final,
slow applause—The end of movement, the closing of jaws.In his kingdom,
the heart slows, and the blood grows cold,
And all that was precious is bartered and sold.But even as all color drains,
as every hope is denied,
He offers the only mercy: an end to the ride.
And so the last rider, crowned by absence, fades through the door,His work complete,
nothing left to restore.He will return, as always,
again and again—An unending shadow at the close of all men.In the hush that remains,
no voices complain,The world is at peace—in his silent domain.