For Leonard: A Man, Cleaning Up After Himself
by @nat-lipstadt
humans born a mess,
messengers carrying blank notepads, sheet music,
brought from within to the without
a baby-sized handful of historical residues retained,
garnered from all too brief a prelim existence,
arriving possessing hints of what may be
most emerging crying,
crying over loss of the womb security,
for seers all, all see unaccountable futures clouded
by an inevitable chance of rain
and death
all of us, no one excepted,
covered for months in shit stained fluids ,
a holy, dirty combination
of amniotic nourishment,
and our own waste
a hint of what is to come?
human then spends the rest of life
cleaning up after himself,
mostly with tasks of addition,
punctuating by the occasional cleansing of
elimination subtraction
making room for the next love,
labored birthing of a baby poem,
from your womb, midwifed,
haunting ghosts of three note tunes,
begging for a set of lyrics and a
great chorus everybody can sing,
a completion competition
going along, all along, to the goings on,
all our routes preternatural crooked,
lived a life of pretense, a straightened out life,
which is the nuanced, connected summary of our components
which are all curves, dots on a line
and the composition source,
the secret chords employed,
tech installed just prior to birth,
effacing glorious sadness, glorious joy,
the human building blocks,
with the certainty that
*everybody knows,
that's how it goes
everybody knows,*
only fools believe,
you'll live forever
but live at least long enough to sing and write of
a man cleaning up his own life's messes,
and perchance, after our absence,
leaving the world better for it