Gone Off in Empty Silence With So Much Unsaid

You had always lived like the time to sagely compose your real message was still to come

But actually you’ve gone off quite silently now, and it seems likely, into eternal emptiness

You felt you waited patiently, still ready to make your statement or to take some real action

Now, it’s hard for others to really know if you were the silent type, or just another empty shell

Gone off in silence but not without leaving a wide trail of random noise and messy litter

As far as we can tell, the space you leave behind still unsullied by any conscious reflection

Your blurry recollections, sloppily stored, simply evaporate, unsorted and un-distilled

That is, finished but not summarized, finalized but not completed, gone but not packed up

Went away unprepared, unwilling and unable to form even a short and sensible goodbye

Borne off, you thought, before your time, with yet so much you had never even started

Carried off of the couch to the hospital, then to the cemetery without even a decent interval

You raised your hand far too late, buried without even having thought out a real question

Gone beyond our limited communications even should you find your true voice at last

We will label it a so-called mute testimony and say it was really all you planned on leaving

Caught off-guard and carried away in silence, or did you actually have nothing at all to say?

Hey! Nobody could ever read the beautiful thoughts that may have existed, but only in your head

You have departed, having tacitly accepted things as they were going, and are going further still

Now you have left it to us impute your beliefs merely from your mundane habits

We can’t know your brilliance and grand emotions from your so very ordinary life

Though your soul may have been filled to bursting, it has all evaporated, without any residue

Your wondrous family surrounds you now, but you call each one by a different name

With the drugs, you cannot realize that they know you’ve already gone off in silence

The past is closing in around you because you can no longer process the present

Though your greatest works still await you, there is only a future that you will not experience

Yet, there still are those many things you would have, could have, and, likely, should have done

In your mind, you kept reserved the future for those special tasks that you were born to do

But the short time you paused was confused by a drugged pain, in impersonal surroundings

The last thing you read was another bill and the last thing you wrote was a check

You did not plan on your self-numbing repetitions halting without some decent interlude

There was only time to cap off your life with a short period of deliriously painful suffering

Torn away so quickly and completely with barely time for the briefest of regrets

Gone off in a silence that we can only try to differentiate from a simple & mindless emptiness