An Existential John Boy Walton

He sat by the flicker of thought’s old flame,

Naming the unknown, though knowing no name.

The stars in his attic were lanterns of lore,

Yet the silence beneath burned deeper at the core.

He wrestled with meaning the way one breathes air,

Invisible, endless, and heavy with care.

The ink on his fingers was both sin and prayer,

Each word was a wound he was willing to bear.

He had written of shadows pretending to see,

Of angels of mind and devils that flee.

He traced the dimension where reason can slip,

And poured his confusion from life to his lip.

The mirror was kinder before he had read,

The gospels of neurons that spoke to the dead.

He knew that the cortex could conjure despair,

Yet the soul still insisted there was someone there.

He whispered of gods who were born in the brain,

Of spirit reduced to electric domain.

Still, in his chambers, the silence replied,

That truth without mystery is half‑alive.

He built an altar of paradox sand,
The tide of his logic erased what he planned.

For every equation he found in the mist,

He uncovered a yearning that couldn’t resist.

Through psychology’s window, he saw his own face,

Half saint, half child, half out of place.

Attachment and terror were parents entwined,

In the labyrinth heart of the questioning mind.

He prayed to the pulse at the base of his skull,

To grant him a moment where thought becomes full.

He envied the sparrow, content to be real,

While his intellect carved what his soul couldn’t heal.

He wrote of surrender in rational tones,

Of crucified logic and animated stones.

His faith was not blinded, nor purely devout,

It lived in the gaps where certainty runs out.

He met his own shadow in scripture and sin,

Talking to silence, with truth wearing thin.

But just as despair took root in the clay,

A quiet illumination showed him a way.

He saw that the fracture was how we begin,

A cosmos within us, both chaos and kin.

The answer, he realized, was never a line,

But the movement between the profane and divine.

At dawn, with his questions uncoiled and bare,

He breathed through the echoes suspended in air.

He smiled—not for victory, but for the fight,

For knowing that darkness, too, carries light.

He closed his worn journal, his thoughts running deep,

Knowing some truths must wake while others sleep.

And in that surrender, his name became gone,

But his words kept on living, still writing him on.

…

DCG