A Few Lines Before I Go, by Carl Scharwath

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A Few Lines Before I Go is a slender, contemplative chapbook of short philosophical poems that linger at the edges of departure—personal, spiritual, and existential. In these spare, incisive pieces, the poet distills moments of awakening, absence, and quiet rebellion into lines that feel both urgent and timeless.

The collection includes the restless energy of “The Activist,” where shouts and songs chase revolution yet evade answers, capturing the paradox of action that is loud but ultimately unresolved. From there, the voice turns inward: in “Introspection,” words lie dormant amid “silent nothingness,” suggesting poetry itself as a fragile vessel for the unsayable. Nostalgia becomes a kind of coma in “Asleep,” a plea to be roused from memory’s grip into raw presence. The chapbook closes on a note of ironic transcendence in “Missing Life’s Pivotal Moments,” where supernatural faith sustains the speaker—yet they sleep through the very Rapture they await.

Written in a minimalist style that favors brevity over ornament, these poems function like whispered meditations or half-remembered dreams. Each piece occupies only a few lines, yet leaves a resonant hush, inviting the reader to pause and confront their own thresholds: between action and stillness, belief and doubt, waking and vanishing.

A Few Lines Before I Go is for anyone standing at a quiet crossroads, sensing that something essential is slipping away—or just arriving—while they are briefly, beautifully distracted by living.