What Is The End?
What is the end?
A time or a place?
On what attaching fact does it hinge?
Is it propelled forward or does it have wings?
Is there a stream of air or a road?
Does it consolidate into a path, just one?
How conscious this path if just one?
Does it know when it stops, it is the end,
Or is it spinning confused in an open road?
Each direction, 360 degrees, all places and no place?
Can the mind lift itself and rise above with wings,
Or is the journey bolted down like a hinge?
Now there is movement on one plane on a hinge,
But, now not to be unhinged, is it only one plane, just one?
Or like implied before, does the mind lift itself with wings,
And to where, to what end?
Is this a propelled journey going from place to place,
Or is the final destination just a flat road?
So much energy expended to reach a flat road
Are all our thoughts attached and held by a hinge?
Is everything defined by a finite time and place?
Are all possibilities accidents, just a probability of one?
Does the word finite or infinite define the end?
We like to think there are many possibilities, and we have wings.
When we think and speculate, don’t we have wings?
We rather be attached to the divinity of air, not a road.
We hope our flex and lift produces possibilities, not just an end.
We hope we are free with a will and not trapped by a hinge.
Why if our life’s thoughts travel here, there, then why is our time doomed to just one?
Isn’t the world and universe and planes of existence more than just one place?
Okay, our thoughts crowd us, wall us, but not in just one place.
There is an illusion that we fly here, there and have wings.
The volume of our flapping, viscous thoughts feel more possible than just one.
The journey must continue on, maybe the illusion is the road.
Even a little lift off this plane, though still attached to the hinge
Suggests our lives, thoughts do not end.
Our thoughts take flight even when attached to just one place.
This end may not trap or still our wings.
Though attached to a road, that road is attached to a door-opening hinge?
Dan Cuddy (1944-2025) served for many years as an editor of the Loch Raven Review. Prior to that, Dan was a contributing editor with the Maryland Poetry Review, and with Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. Dan was published in many small magazines over the years, e.g. NEBO, Antioch Review, Connecticut River Review and online at Praxilla, The Potomac, and L‘Allure des Mots. His book of poems “Handprint On The Window” was published by Three Conditions Press.