Published September 1, 2021
by Justin Azar
(San Francisco, California, USA)
Pages filled with wishing. Brimming with dreams of a reality not yet shattered. Boundlness triumphs and endless nights.
Pages filled with goals covered by words like "hopefully" and "someday." Countless scenarios worked out each more naive than the last.
Pages filled with complications, roadblocks that seem approachable maybe even surmountable.
Pages filled with concerns followed by doubts then followed by worry spotted with phrases like "I guess" and "it wasn't meant to be."
Pages filled with disappointment littered with sparse comments and incoherent thoughts of envy maybe even hatred.
Pages filled with regrets of a life unimaginably empty yet filled to the brim.
The man looks back at the chronicle of his life, the pages upon pages of remarks, remembering only the concerns of a child whose greatest fear in life was having too many pages in front of him.
The man closes the book, runs his fingers along the broken spine feeling the creased edges and torn leather. Through every scribbled verse and crossed out criticism the binding, the leather, the pages they all remained. The leather browned by the elements, the pages yellowed by his touch, the corners creased by his worry. Yet all withstanding. Permanent.
The man's greatest triumph is the words unspoken, illegibly scratched into every corner, yet heard. The thoughts given life in the pages never to be read in a book destined to be lost. A manifest of the man's life soon to be forgotten hoping never to be remembered.
So on his last page of his last book, the man writes a poem. A farewell to the pages forgotten and a goodbye to the ones never to come. A poem to ease himself whispering goodbye sweetly in his ear.
Biography
My name is Justin Azar and I write poetry as a method for me to express the abstract and unempirical personal experience to paper, which I often strive to disregard in my field of biological research. My work reflects the mesmerizing chaos of reality that we all grapple with.
Previously published in San Francisco Poetry Magazine:
"San Francisco Bay MK-ULTRA Program" by Gerard Sarnat
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