(My Eyes Have Seen) The End of the World
These eyes watched the last trembling gasp of daylight—
a brittle sun choking on a sky gone gray.
Empires fell quiet, towers stripped bare of light,
every monument to progress withering in endless dark.
Once, windows flickered against the despair,
holding on.
Now only ghosts remain—shadows thickening,
suffocating the air.
Cities gutted, bones jutting from the earth’s skin,
as if all the world’s promise was a wound
opened at birth.
Streets drown in memory.
Every step rings hollow.
Nothing moves but wind dragging secrets
no one follows.
There was a time when laughter traced the edges of dawn,
when bodies filled spaces, warm, unrushed, drawn.
Now alleys cradle silence deeper than graves,
a hush that suffocates even the bravest attempt to save.
I wander through the carcass of civilization,
hands brushing dust from relics that once held adoration—
a child’s shoe, a broken screen, a lock of hair caught in a door.
Evidence of lives that simply
breathed here
no more.
I’ve watched fire gnaw through stone and bone,
flames consume everything, still hungry, still alone.
The world didn’t end by gods or monstrous will
but by quiet hungers multiplying,
unchecked,
still.
Dreams withered not in agony but in apathy’s gentle scorn,
promises drowning in routine until nothing was left to mourn.
I’ve watched rivers clot with ash,
the ocean’s heart decay,
fields turned to wasteland,
all green bled away.
No rescue. No rebirth.
Just cold repetition of loss—
a litany of goodbyes smothered by gathering moss.
No sun breaks the dark.
No birdsong cuts the gloom.
Even rats abandon hope in these rooms.
Each breath borrowed from the dead.
The air tastes of memory, the bitterness of what’s been said.
Echoes of distant riots hang like cobwebs on every wall.
Shattered glass shines like warnings,
sharp reminders of the fall.
Stars refuse to burn.
Moon retreats behind haze.
Every clock stuck at midnight,
denying days their passage.
I’ve learned the anatomy of emptiness,
the texture of regret.
Every heartbeat a reminder
of all I cannot forget.
No promise of morning.
No mercy left to beg.
Just the tremor in my chest
walking this endless regime of dust and design—
nothing left to lose,
nothing left to find.
Bones of the world litter my path.
Twisted steel crowns the aftermath.
I pass cathedrals now—stained glass gouged, cracked,
God’s stories shattered, scattered,
never reenacted.
Prayers here are silent but heavy,
each wish gone unspoken.
Love fossilized in handprints,
bonds forever broken.
Statues stare blindly, faces streaked with rain,
mouths open in agony or in vain.
History ends in dust motes swirling,
archives torn and burned.
The only lesson left:
nothing is ever learned.
In dreams, I see the faces that vanished.
Whole cities waving from the dark,
longing not to be banished.
I remember softness of grass beneath childhood feet,
the taste of rain, the heat of breath—
every flavor now obsolete.
Sometimes I whisper to shadows,
half hoping they’ll reply.
But silence answers back,
as honest as any lie.
Regret is a plague with no cure,
circling back through my mind—
all the lives never lived,
all the love left behind.
When I close my eyes, afterimages remain:
scarlet, violet,
the black beyond pain.
I’ve cataloged the extinction of laughter,
watched the last story falter,
no audience left after.
I linger in remnants of rituals abandoned—
candles melted down,
their meanings forever stranded.
Even ghosts seem weary,
reluctant to haunt.
Perhaps even the dead lose purpose
in a world that can’t.
Hope lingers here, but only as a rumor—
a joke told to the dying
to make the end smoother.
The end is a room with no doors.
Dreams and despair are indistinguishable spores.
I keep walking through this graveyard of desire,
each step a resignation,
a quiet funeral pyre.
I become the witness to the unmaking—
one set of eyes left open,
one heart that keeps breaking.
And yet, in the dark, some ancient instinct persists.
A will to mark the ending,
to insist I exist.
Perhaps that’s defiance.
Perhaps just fear.
To witness the world’s last sigh,
to record it here.
No sun will rise.
No warmth will heal.
Only the hollow truth,
unmasked,
real.
But as I stand in ruins, one truth won’t rescind:
my eyes have seen the end of the world—
and I remember everything
that came before the end.