"Looking forward into the past" is an impossible instruction, and the first line of Stanley Victor Paskavich's "The End of The Journey" seems to know it. The future is meant to be faced and the past left behind, but here the two are fused, and old events are said to "always last." From the opening, the speaker is caught in a loop, and everything that follows grows out of that trap: the sleeplessness, the failing senses, the final aimless walk.
The poem's central idea is the erosion of a self by memory and dread. The speaker can no longer tell whether he is living through his life or already past it. The second couplet blurs the boundaries of rest: "Sleepless thoughts held in day dreams, / slumbering visions with hellish screams." Sleep and waking have swapped their qualities, so thoughts stay awake while visions "slumber," and neither state brings relief. Then comes a sharper admission: "Some pain I earned, some came free." The word "free" is bitterly casual, as if suffering were a grim bargain, and the speaker cannot sort deserved pain from unearned pain. The question "Will I be condemned by my own mind?" borrows the language of a courtroom. The mind becomes judge and prison at once, which may explain why the speaker avoids the mirror: it would mean facing the one who passes sentence.
The middle of the poem turns to the body, and here the imagery is at its most effective. "My food tastes bland and has no smell" is itself a flat, unadorned line, so its plainness acts out the blandness it describes. "All the colors are bleeding into one" is more striking. Bleeding suggests a wound, and it also describes a world losing its distinctions. Even the sun, which ought to warm, only delivers "death's chill," so each new day counts as a step toward the end. When the speaker asks, "Is this my life? Or is this Hell?", the "or" offers no real alternative. The question seems to answer itself.
The form supports this sense of circling. The poem runs to twenty-two lines, arranged as eleven rhymed couplets, with loose four-beat lines that stretch here and there ("I avoid the mirror and things of vanity"). The rhymes are mostly simple and expected: past/last, day/away, smell/Hell. That chiming, almost nursery-rhyme regularity could be read as a weakness, since it sits uneasily beside such dark material. It could also be read as the sound of a mind going over the same ground, each couplet snapping shut like a door. The one place the chime wobbles is the near-rhyme of "time" and "mind," right where the speaker asks whether any escape exists. The word "mind" then returns as a rhyme in "no future path in mind," so the faculty that condemns the speaker is also the one that cannot imagine a way out. The poem asks three questions and answers none, and by the second half it has mostly stopped asking.
The ending is deliberately deflated. "Life and love or death and fear, / confusing concepts, so unclear" lines up two pairs of big abstractions, and the speaker cannot say which side he stands on. The phrase "confusing concepts" is dry, almost clinical, which fits a mind too numb for passion. In the last couplet, "All that's left of my mortal strand" suggests a thread worn thin, and what remains is "my aimless walk upon this land." The title promises an ending, but a journey needs a destination, and this one never arrives. It simply runs out of energy. That gap between the title and the final image is the poem's quiet irony.
The poem is worth reading because it gives an inside view of numbness rather than melodrama. Some phrases, such as "hellish screams," lean on familiar language. But the loss of taste, smell and colour carries real weight, because it shows despair as the slow draining of ordinary sensation. The poem offers no consolation, and it does not pretend to. It ends mid-step, which may be the most truthful thing about it.