• Someone, a trusted friend and confidante,
    Once whispered to me in a midnight fantasy,
    “There’s someone behind you, just waiting for you
    To turn around and face Death with open arms,”

    I knew, in that moment, in that dream I had
    That I soon would fade from the pages of Life
    Into the grays and blacks and whites of the lost.
    So I thought more in that one moment, in that dream,
    Than I ever had before in a given second.

    I wondered to myself why words are formed on a page
    By little brush-stroke letters like tiny feathers
    From a teacup-sized sparrow on the wind,
    And what any of them had to do with
    The grays and blacks and whites of the world.

    And who I really am, not just a name
    Or another face in a sea of bobbing colors;
    Not just another gray, or black, or white,
    But a true identity, someone, not something.

    And music, oh, the music! I ask myself,
    Where do the inkblot notes come from? Are they
    Simply long gossamer strings of thought? Or
    Another part of the grays and the blacks and the whites
    Of the colorless world we’ve created?

    And so, once my thoughts, from a moment, from a dream,
    Had settled, I sighed and turned on a heel, knowing
    What my life was about, the music, the words,
    And me, and the grays, and the blacks, and the whites.
    I bowed to Death, the gentleman in sable robes,
    And in that dream, we walked side by side on the lonely road
    To a place where Death, and soon I, would call home.