Erasure

If there were a door

Behind which lay instant death

Not just, but complete erasure,

Obliteration from all makings of recorded truth;

Of human knowledge, and mine own

I may take it

It is not death one seeks

But the chance to have never begun

Markings on a page never written; still,

Time’s foe is recruited at an apsis

And erasure, the agony of existence sustained, is its promise

Must we kill time, if the door stands?

Yet I know that in the turbulence of living,

A windswept plain, of overbearing misery

That the spirit of perseverance persists

No, we must not go meekly into tragedy, but fighting

And the annals of history would read;

It was a door I never opened.