Pendulum of Darkness: A ballad about confronting one's own abyss

Tells the story of a soul caught between fear and awakening, swinging back and forth like a pendulum between light and shadow. It explores the moments when a person is forced to face the parts of themselves they’ve tried to bury—old wounds, quiet regrets, and the whispered truths that echo in the dark. This ballad is not about despair, but about transformation: the painful yet necessary descent into one’s inner abyss so that strength, clarity, and self-understanding can rise from it. It is a journey where every swing into darkness brings a deeper understanding of the light waiting on the other side.

Listen closely! In the night, when the wind creaks through the black arcades of your soul, when you hold your breath and your gaze feels its own darkness, there—right there—begins the ballad of your loneliness. You are no longer a traveler, a poet, a judge; you are only an echo, a cry that cannot be silenced, an apparition trapped in the vaults of your own abyss.

The raven of eternity crowns its name on your brow: "Never again! Never again!" Its beak tears apart the entrails of your hope; its feather builds you a black home, and its eyes shine like candles on the marble of your unforgiven sins. Shards of mirror lie scattered on the floor of your dreams—each reflecting them countless times, wherever you run, wherever you hope.

Moonlight falls upon your mind like a flaming veil of madness—and within it, every thought pulsates like an electric fish in still water. Silence has no smell; it has weight. In this silence, time no longer flows; it drips slowly in thick, black drops that suck out memories and devour every mask on your face.

Down below, in the deepest chamber, a whisper without a voice calls to you, a hand without a body, a memory without an image. The corridors are filled with your footsteps, which never made a choice. Oh, how long have you been running! Fleeing from the gaze of darkness, from the eyes that know, from the truth that knows no mercy. But now—there is no door anymore, no key anymore; before you you stand, without a face, without a smile, without shame: judge and condemned, poet and oblivion.

The death knell tolls not for the end, but for a life of self-deception; each thunderclap breaks a chain, each echo brings back a light from the lost halls of self-knowledge. You try to scream, but your voice catches in your throat; you try to weep, but the tears have long since dried up. Only a sigh remains—cold as the gold of an old, forged key, a key that hung on a heart from which the bliss of faith had vanished.

Step now: All that was—dust and ashes, lies, lust, and shame—is now an ashtray from which, with the last will of darkness, a new heart sprouts. Your body is your grave and your cathedral. Your spirit is the sum of all broken icons; your soul is a song—floating slowly toward dawn, but never seeing the sun, waiting eternally beneath other people's bells for the dawn to break.

Oh, look—one last time—at this face, the face that pulls you back from all the abysses, the pale face, the face that knows all your names of death and longing. Admit it: You are the source of all darkness, you are the beginning and the end of your own enigma, you are the poet who writes the epitaph in the night, you are the last sigh over the grave of your illusions.

And when the silence finally sings, when every breath in the deadly darkness becomes a prayer, you will feel: The abyss is your home, and from it, from your broken wings, a cry will be born – and this cry is not the guarantee of death, but the fire of new worlds.

Then, and only then, when every fear merges with every longing, when there is no turning back, will you understand, oh, you will understand in all its darkness and grandeur:

I AM – poet, chaos, night and dawn, gravedigger and angel of my own eternity.