Did I not ask for pain?


I'm thinking of you, little girl,
who stared too long at the squirrels in the street
or at the birds in the backyards, missing their heads
poor animal, sweet thing
What a brutal way to go

I heard you wanted to know
what it felt like
I heard you wanted to see for yourself

incredible, i scrap for bits of you
you are dead and alive forever

i am on a bus looking at the sky out the window
clouds straight above me, moving slow, yet never same, always moving, always new
i'm looking up at the sky but i'm buried beneath millenias of rubble and sand
i am alive now as i write this
breathing and thinking every word through,
breath and write with me each of these words, one after the other, even those, even these,
yet i am permanently gone (and always have been), screaming into the future
"I am forgotten!"

for a while after my death this poem will be a portal
where you can speak to a 20 year old ******* a bus in ithaca, typing these words in my notes, listening to Mitski, mourning my mother, mourning the future, mourning you,
who is peering into this portal and speaking to me now
I can hear you
and as I'm underneath the sand, clawing uselessly for air, after eternity, and in an instant,
I will hear you screaming with me
We are all forgotten forever
Time and the universe will erase each other
After the final black whole
warps the remaining scraps of light
into an unfathomable nothing-strand, and we all evaporate with the bottom of eternity
if there is a way to escape
sing it to me
even after my eternal silence
my soul will be open
even if i am too far underneath the sand
even if you never read this poem
we are a portal
and I hear your call
and your heart is beating, and you are real
and all the dead can feel your pulse
and we are singing back to you.

we were all born at once
we are eternity
and we are the beginning
we are the present
and humanity dies with us.