Welcome to the Mindscape

Nothing is ever what it seems.

The end isn’t here yet,

But you can see everything crumbling around you,

Shattered, battered, tattered. 

Gravity is falling—

And everything else is falling apart.

 

You can smell the pine trees burning in the wind,

The choking, suffocating stench of smoke.

The fire blazes a fierce red,

And you can’t help but wonder why you didn’t see this coming.

You read the book every day, but you didn’t notice that its pages stopped.

You didn’t realize that there were questions without answers,

Let alone answers you didn’t even want to know.

 

You can see the shooting star falling to the ground,

Its colors, once vibrant, fading away.

You can see the mark it left on impact,

Destroying everything around it in a blaze of light.

Something so beautiful shouldn’t be able to cause such carnage.

It makes you wonder if love is just as dangerous as hate,

And if struggling to hold onto someone is worse than just letting them go.

 

The wind isn’t just rustling through the forest anymore,

It’s ripping through it like a knife,

Tearing apart everything in sight.

The only solution left is simple:

Run. Run like hell.

Run until you can find a way to stop the madness.

Run until your heart gives out,

Run until you can’t remember why you’re running.

 

But you can’t run from shadows,

Not when the sun has been snuffed out like a candle

And the darkness is everywhere.

You can’t run from the night.

It’d be easier to run from yourself—

But you can’t do that either.

 

Part of you wants to assign the blame.

It’s your fault for trying to leave her,

It’s her fault for not letting you go.

It’s his fault for saying you were made for more,

It’s the devil’s fault for making a deal when she was low. 

 

But it doesn’t matter who’s at fault.

No matter who struck the match, 

The fire still burns.

No matter who stopped it,

The world no longer turns.

 

Three days on your own.

Three— one for each of your mistakes.

The first was putting your faith in that old book.

Ink and paper can’t save you from the end—

And neither can the author.

Notes and theories, codes and clues, illustrations and schematics—

All written by a mortal man.

A mortal man who made fatal mistakes,

Mistakes that he can’t take back,

Mistakes you can’t reverse.

 

Your second mistake was believing in heroes.

Do heroes even exist?

It’s up for debate.

But even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to save you.

And trying to be one only brought you pain and defeat.

You’ve seen heroes.

And you know that they die.

You’ve heard about happy endings,

But you know they’re all lies.

 

Your third mistake was hiding the truth.

You set up lies, but they turned into trip-lines,

Setting you up at every turn,

Trapping you in a corner. 

You can’t keep people safe when they don’t know the truth,

Because ignorance is a danger.

What she didn’t know is going kill everyone.

You were a fool not to tell her the truth.

 

And now you don’t even know the truth anymore.

Right is wrong and up is down and everything’s insane.

Time has stopped permanently,

Leaving you stranded and trapped in this nightmare of a chessboard.

The pawns played their part, the queen has fallen, and the king isn’t even on the board.

And nothing makes sense anymore.

Puppets are the masters because their strings are gone, burned to ashes.

 

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang,

And not with a whimper,

But with a false calm before a storm of madness

The world ends when gravity falls.

 

Comments

Additional Resources

Get AI Feedback on your poem

Interested in feedback on your poem? Try our AI Feedback tool.
 

 

If You Need Support

If you ever need help or support, we trust CrisisTextline.org for people dealing with depression. Text HOME to 741741