The big bang was your conception.
The expansion of nutritive gases and stars
filled the womb of your pregnant mother.
As barely an earthed fetus, you seemed an animal.
As a newborn, you grew primitively, slowly rose.
Enlightenment when you came of age
to discover yourself human.
Now, in your Twenty-First, the century
of drugged science, you live like a half-god
in ever-questioning evolved reversion,
in a contradictory asylum of paralyzing speed,
rising steep to its ringed peak funneling fumes
that revive the smell of your instincts, primal and fiery.
Then, in one final breath, in the outpour
on volcano’s point, melting and bursting
in radial gasps once again, will come your death
in a matter of ours, the eschaton, a new bang
desired and conceived anew, so that in rebirth
will be your survival, in rebirth our continuity.

We slump on the couch when we return like lifetimes
have passed before us.
We have to, even though it was only a seven minute walk
to the dining hall, because 1) the food was just
“weird consistency”
(which we tend to say regardless), 2) the light
in there yawned indifferently to us (when does it not?), and
3) the reassuring clink of our forks on our
plates wasn’t even there this time it was
hiding underneath slop
and smothered on top by the intruding sound waves
(who asked?)
of our next-table neighbors’ lives.

You made a sly remark about seconds to catch
a glimpse of youthful ****.
She’d gone to get some more baby carrots and cucumber slices
to put in her salad maybe
(who knows? who cares?)
Either way, her youthful **** would make the food taste like
something to you. And you
described them to us when you sat down again so
the slop would taste like something to us
(there’s pride in that type of generosity, don’t forget) and

(congratulations)

we had the faint impression of
some sort of
****** there, but

we didn’t tell you
(it’s easier that way).

A cup, a squeeze, a kiss on her ******* yes that could feed
our hunger for a night. And tonight was a night
like any, so her ******* led us to talk

of women, and women led us to talk of
love
(and the blooming one for the poor *******)
as we who lost withstood the vicarious twinge of
an addling ****** very different from
the first.

This one led us to pine for sweets, but the ones we found
were dry, so we left the table, left the dining hall, looking around at
the others: the lonely, the couples, the blessed
lonely couples, and the fortunate friends
huddled against everything with open laughter, enjoying
the weird consistency like drunk theoretical physicists before
they discovered bubbles and inflated eternally meaning
when they safeguarded a
zoo with a pistol they didn’t know how to
use, in Soviet Russia.

(So you see?) We have to slump on the couch
when we return like lifetimes  
have passed before us.
No one even bothers to pick up a guitar, we leave all four of them
strewn on the floor like
dead wooden boxes because
Dylan or Young or Cash (or whoever)
is already in the living
room. Any
bubbling, inflating, theoretical physicist
(any drunk, pistol-packing zookeeper, for that matter) will
tell you that.

So we slump, comfortably uncomfortable,
(at least we’re trying!)
feeling their (our) strings plucking. No sounds, no voices.
Because we don’t need
to hear this that.
Not right
now. (Not right
now).

Of course we’re born sad little creatures!
To be born, we had to have the picture
broken & bursted—for, being born, we’re
fragments of it. (But not just us born—all
of it that’s born…all of it’s fragments.)
Us, though, we found out about the pieces
(and that we’re them) so shock-hearted and
weary-eyed we joggle ourselves around,
and waggle and babble (because we can move
and talk to the other pieces, like you) in the
sedulous task of trying to see what picture we all
formed before we were born and to see
if we can’t form it again while born and living.
And, also, inexorably, to see like fateless
naked goggling chicken-children what part
we have—is it a sun’s ray, a cloud’s feather, a
grass blade, or is it just the indistinguishable
shade of unctuous bole that’s laid there
almost smeared in between? I’m not quite sure,
our tabs seem flexible enough, and to add
we’re whimsy little interlockers, so no wonder
we’ve been going on billions of years now.
At this point it’s probably give-up or never-end,
and both options, frankly, seem quite abominable.
I wonder if that’s what it says on the box,
right above “meant for children” and “small
parts dangerous choking hazard.” But the
question is what to do when you’ve realized a
piece has been missing, always been missing,
and probably more. (Oh, and for after, you can
ask if it was never put there in the first place,
and why)—do you just imagine, then? I mean,
just that—just imagine the whole thing, after all
the fuss been going on to hold hands and make it out?
I’m telling you, I bet the sucker is something else
entirely, like something I don’t even know what,
but different—crazy different, I bet. And it’s
probably why they didn’t want to include it,
those ponzies—we wouldn’t choke on that one.
Not that piece. Still, though, I hope it says on the box.
I hope it at least tells you something on the box.
Wait, where’s the box? What box?

By writing it
and having it pass through
time like
a sacrament
and swaddling it afterwards
in puffs of piano or violin
or shocking it through
electricity, post-rock,
pushing it with
your hands and
shoulder muscles
off the floor, then
off the earth, by
pulling it, lifting it
stretching it, holding it,
and with substance
or without
then releasing it
fully into yourself, where
the rushing blood
has gone.

What are you
trying

to do, buddy??

::his
eyes being
pulled up by
the fragile question
as two
wounds
opening
glisten::

What

are you trying

to do?

I told this
***
a life-long necessity
of mine
more or less.
But first I said,
before anything, maybe
it’s just a life-long exhaustion
of mine I’m
expelling needlessly, okay?
I want to make sure you
know that
so you don’t go thinking
I’m weird or nothing,
though honestly  

it all drops hard like
iron
faster than
gravity
to the same
place
anyway.

But this is what I told him:

Sometimes I wish the world
would roll up all it’s got.
Roll it all up in one unsettling
heap of heaviness it can
toss on me like stock from the
deep. O I wish to God it’d
give me the torturous insanity
and every inexplicable loss
it can conjure up—just one
catatonically tremendous
slap to my stupid little
face, flushing it with
cosmic humiliation
and fear I don’t even
notice I ****** myself.

So that, at least, it’d all be
there, you know? And I wouldn’t
have to ask where it is and
what the hell’d I do
to get spared.

I told him give me the
holocausted ashes smelling of
Zyklon B, the crawling away from
sawed off shotgun shells
catching friends hiding under
the library desk anyway, the
running over of your dad by
a drunk who lost his wife to
the cancer that took the brother of
somebody you knew whose
mother had

suicidal depression, hadn’t
smiled really in years, she’d
sat with cold coffee
for years, and around her
had been worse than
darkness, for a reason she
never ended up knowing.

I said to him give me the
harshest words a child has
ever known against him
and have them rest upon
my spine like a freezing
brain spreading electric
wild fires across
my vertebrae, give me
burning skin really
burning, and cheating wife seen
moaning, and drowning baby now
dead
and beaten wife now
collapsing, another baby now
beaten and
thirsty wino keep drinking, and
a stranger with his face
blown off red and
brown and tattered and
I don’t know how but
still hanging there like
boiling chicken fat, dripping,
but the doctors
able to keep his heart
beating and his organs
pumping too, so now
people can see him
and his whole face
as an indication there is
something in the air
that deserves pitying.

Give me it, I said,
with homicide and
double homicide, and
a side of
stabbings and
chokings and
bludgeonings
and guns and rope and
gas and asphyxiations
and love letters and
love-making giddy ***
and flowers for the
love of your life
who is cutting herself
because she can’t stop
cutting up souls after
she *****.

Give me everybody’s
******* loneliness
that is lonelier than
a thing lost before it was
born, and as it was
being born, born into
losing itself, its slow
destruction, and there was
not even anybody there because
there was never going to be
anything to help you, there is
nothing to be achieved and
nothing for which
striving is
helpful.

There just is a memory of
a hazy possibility of
happiness, that one
felt once
in a senseless dream.
A memory that is
always fading towards
non-existence or
existence that has
no place for it, because
it is already full of
something else, and you,
your “transcendence,”
are wasting time,
waiting.

What are you waiting for I
said (with just a little irony).
Give me the heaviness, don’t
hide it anymore. Show it
all bare and give it all
to me. Tell me, here, take this
and hold it for the sake of—

What?—what is this?
Is it this? Just
the universe drooling on itself? Or
is it more? Somehow less?

Well, for the sake of
whatever lies here (lies here!)
and is too ****** in eternity to
delight us with a clear
answer to the
question that all the
living creatures on this
sacrosanct dirt, in some
crevice of their being, I know,
are asking it.

And this ***, when I finished
telling him what I’ve just told you
didn’t say anything back.
His brown face was treaded terrain,
crumpled cracked ditches,
broken dry grin.

He looked elsewhere, smelling of
decades of drunken alcohol
and lice and yellow toenails and
******* alone against
brick walls at night

and also his brown hands
adjusting the dirt-drenched
cardboard bed he will surrender to
tonight, after who knows
what else.

Oftentimes, the breathing
is not easy breath
conscious of
the in, out      in, out.

When air must clamber
up the rough of the throat
as if a tired ghost
a worn conscience.

For breath, for some,
is heavy—laden with
the impossibility
of impossibility.

With more and too much,
which, often misunderstood,
is too little—a slow
starvation, acrid churning

of emptiness
in the lungs. A sense of
air’s capacity, moving now,
to cease movement and fall

down the rungs, back
irrevocably to that place
that gave it up, away,
so hopeful

it would be forever
newborn.

And some
must dandle themselves
to keep from going still.

To force the breath
back up and out. Out as if
the diseased life were really
a beacon of purity.