Everything

by Blaize Fernandez

Our faces are woven into the patterned sheet where you died—everything. Gathered in plaid, in rows and intersections, is everything.

The last dark days of pasts meet the end of the strip—where futures live—to see Möbius: the days ever-cyclical, each singular expressions of everything.

I handed you the tips of my fingers because you could know only effects,
Absent of cause, but I saw in your silver eyes bastions of everything.

“There will be days of greater darkness,” you’d say, but on the slick pavement, Lying in the street, is today in nebulous reflections of everything.

My dead hand—the particulate billions enslaved to motion—draws a breath
And traces the peaks, the plains, the depressions of everything.

The highway view, the eternal moon, the faces of sun and sons always elude
These carefully drawn lines, for they are hopeless impressions of everything.

What a challenge is posed to the singular fruits of this laden orchard, bellowing, Screaming in the wind’s leaf-sung chorus: “One” is only the repression of everything.

When, caving, my world turns to sludge, where will I be? The orchard
Of the eternal, the sentence and prophecy—those confessions of everything.

So sat stark against the backdrop of being, I am blazing but weary. The heights
Of youth beneath me, I ask for what every “I” asks: to be an exception to everything.

Blaize Fernandez is a student at Lawrence University with interests in literature, philosophy, and religion.