Science
Bathed in electric impulse, drowning in syrupy endorphins, I breathe a swampy breath through your tangled hair. Your bare feet are pressed against the windshield, toe knuckles white from curling. You slither your tongue around the twisted contours of my ear and I writhe like a primordial amoeba in a cesspool of gene pools. Evolution is a joke.

Souls
Ostensible existence, like life in a dream where someone grabs you by your ears, shouting, “This is real!” before their hands are vapor and they float away. You watch the mist of your assailant and remember that you’re dreaming. You wake up, hopefully next to someone. Someone who holds you by your ears and whispers that she’s real. Someone who’ll evaporate, who you’ll evaporate to follow.

Permanence
Starlight older than humanity skips and splashes, like a handful of pebbles, into dark puddles behind my eyes. Some of those stars are dead by now, long ago extinguished or exploded. It has taken their fossils thousands of years to reach me here in my backyard. Beside my left eye is a scar that, though it doesn’t have the permanence of light, will be there as long as I’m alive. I often drive by the hospital where I got those stitches. I might die in that hospital someday.

Footprints
One summer I left footprints on a beach in California, then I watched as the sea lifted itself to slap them away. Another summer I tracked mud into the house after playing in a rainstorm. That winter I followed my father out of the house, stepping where he stepped. My father had a telescope. He told me that astronauts had left footprints on the moon where nothing could ever erase them. Those footprints will be there long before I track mud into my mother’s house and stand in my father’s footprints. They will be there long after those of the men who carry me into the ground.

Exalted eggs
sell lent egg salad
to eggshells.
Egg beaters
beat her
for the better
of the better
eggs.
Yokes of the yokel
yolks
choke the yolks
they’re meant to yoke.
Though runny and broken,
run he and broke in.
****** he,
dumped he,
leaving all the eggs
in eggshells.
These saddest fractions,
in shattered
silence, sigh “Let’s
decompose.
Let’s be compost.
Let’s become a flower.”
But on the wind
they twist,
they wind,
they rose.

I, a willing ******
sacrifice to this
deity dreamt up by cavemen
trading shells
for gobs of ******
meat.
In my pocket
I hold paper bearing
sacred holy writ,
and on the internet
somewhere
are hours of my existence
documented in binary
like good deeds
in a seraphic tome
ensuring my someday mansion
in the sky.
Rappers wear the dollar sign
like a gilded golden crucifix
because the wealthy are
the holy men when
Jehovah is money.
If I were to preach
against this theology, become
the antichrist, the anarchist,
throw my cash into a stack
and light that ***** up
I’d be burning myself
at the stake.

Pop-Pop-Pop-Pop
gunshots.
People take cover
at the capitol.
Unanswered questions.
Why ram
a barricade into
a luxury car?
A brief lock-down
as congress
unsuccessfully tried
to end the shutdown.
Stay away.

I had a lump once,
under my skin.
Small and unobtrusive
with nothing to say.
It never hurt me or made me sick
but I was still afraid of it.

I paid a man to carve it out,
and when he did I saw it.
Just a small little tumor of fat,
benign and pink.
It had never caused me harm,
and now that it's gone I'm left with a scar.

Scientists in laboratories
     playing with the quark,
accelerating particles
   beyond the speed of light,
searching for the digit
   at the end of things like 3.14159.

Clergymen in tabernacles
   orating ancient prayers,
reading ancient scripture
   to gathered fallen souls,
searching for the deity,
   for Jesus Christ, for God.

Isolated in my room
   with nothing but a notebook
and a restless scribbling pen,
   searching myself for myself.