If I live long enough, I’m told
I will see the annihilation as simple
as the blink of a bubble.

That annihilation I wished
would have surprised me the time
I fed my starvation
with sandwiches in an empty café,
television sputtering clearly static voices,
me staring
at mute moving mouths.

That annihilation I wished
while standing tall, taller than my father,
as a hovering smile on his shoulders above
a triumphant green field.
When he gave me the thumbs up, it
searched me and found me
in that confused, relieved haze of ecstasy,
breathing on me like a love, whispering
“everything was okay for me
and it will be for you.”

I sit now watching moving people,
feeling the fibers in my limbs
suddenly stiffen like taut strings tied to
beyond the chair, beyond the floor
and beyond the earth that made this place
appear here, now, out of infinite possibilities.
I sit and watch faces, their strange parts,
gingerly realize all of mine, and struggle
to laugh off the fear that they are moving
(and I am laughing)
from something called instinct.

I can’t help imagining
the universe that sees me annihilated
this very second.

I wonder where I’ve really been.
I wonder where my remains have gone.

I remember when I was six there
was a hint of it
even then.
I was six.

Six and already acting as if!
trying to catch a setting sun.

As if
a last apricot
snapped of its thin, pendulant
node, were falling into
abscission, and the pulp, and the flame
orange  
flesh, and the
seeds
about to rupture.

Would lay an open hand, one hand
(I think my right)—lay it on
the frail bark of a tree
outside, together, alone. As if
even then
asking the skin
of what rises and holds
organic and tall the
living and strong
not to peel away
leave me.

As if I thought
I don’t know who was beyond,
watching.

But laid it there, still, all popely
and saintly and, really, quite foolishly.
I was six.

Six, and wondered,
had somebody
watched?

I don’t remember what I wanted.
But a trace of something
important
remains
ruptured in me. As if

all along I had known
not to hold out the hands. Known

I am six-teen years later.

her beauty, I was doomed
until the time

soon as I
paved my foundation
tre metri sopra il cielo
three meters above the sky

asked her to bring something
sharp

to chisel her in stone

was not a knife, but her wit,
as she said,
and something else
hidden in her
sockets

We lived briefly outside and at once
all of our one lives one innocuous evening.
I think it must’ve been a round ten.  
We’d gone, really and already, in every sense,
a-stoop-smoking to clear the air of Murakami
and his personal identity. I guess we knew
we’d end up breathing significantly
before time came to shepherd us back in.

On the stoop, aglow in rosewood smoke,
in the streaked light of our chosen nostalgia
and strawberry hope, we pointed to things
we really saw—everything—pressing their
dimensions sharp through the buttery plaster
of our personal identities, like certain words
I happened to glimpse, in and out of Murakami.

I was startled when a car cut through the viscous
street in front of me like a hand underneath a piece
of cloth. It bent still shadows around a perfect
globule of movement and returned each to rest
only after each of its past moments had passed.

That’s when I saw my smoke trail slowly leave me,
unapologetically, heading across the invisible prairie
on its horses to drink by the bending river in the street.
It asked me if I knew, now, why I should come along.

I pointed and asked: What was that I just saw?
Where?
There by the street. What was that?
Oh, that was just
antlers on a fire truck this past Wednesday.
I don’t understand.
Of course you don’t. You won’t remember I said it.
Then why’d you say it?
To remind you you’ll forget.
Oh, I see. Thank you, then. I was about to
forget I’d forget. Now I know
I never will.

the hope, at least

in hope?

To go
to keep going
to keep until
you really can’t

until the last

until there really
is no more
going
or keeping
or lasting
anymore?

And that you were
certain of the last
and that it
was
at the last
at the least

as you hoped.

I’ve heard from the winds
that have kept circling since
the newborn earth began circling

every moment is living
now

every moment is housed within
its own sparkling infinity, yes like
heaven

not heaven the golden
entrance to succulence,
full grapes, lips, or
crowning deliverance, or
even peace

but heaven as freedom being

being the being only, as giving
harshness, the being struggling,
its due release into being
the being only

being without need
to accept or understand
there is no being other

simply being as being touch
before being thought
before being knowledge

I must not know then
I am being then
now

the moments

unknown, and I’ll never,
except somehow have
already, the somewhere
the being is.

When days I wish not to say
or write a word fall upon me
I sleep within and greet the touch
of music’s hand over my eyes.

If you are, as Alan Watts believes,
“the fabric of existence itself,” well
you must be a patch, then, wind-shredded
off the coattail end.

And that’s what the music is for.
Which to keep me, also attached, I’d play
myself if I could and so would you. But you are
off in the wind flailing, remember?

Would anybody hear?

Threads flapping even more
the goodbye to an old man’s coat. But listen.
I’ve heard in it a rhythmic sound. Like the beating
of wings, lifting. Listen to us. It’s like letting

a flag fly.