I'd like to know if I am real.
Everything is too perfect to endure reality,
Pristine processes in a scuffed world.
Just enough oxygen for sustainability, connecting anatomic creations in perfect harmony.
Just the right gravity for breathing capabilities but enough to keep us grounded,
Just the perfect set of genes, containing electrons to keep cells clamped in geometric patterning.
Just the right degree of an axis to create all elements of nature, to nurture a 45th parallel with such virginity.
Just enough atmosphere to keep our fingers grasping, to stir vibration between atomic beings.
Just enough death to keep the cycle continuing.
Just barely.
But no one cares.

I'd like to know where we are going.
Not kinesthetically, no, but where we are going.
I think the world may turn backwards sometimes, and I'd like to know if that's true,
If it's ever going to happen,
And the circumstances, the consequences.
I'd like to know the circumference of Earth and compare it to the universe,
And remind myself of just how insignificant I am, we are, even all together.
But no one cares

I'd just like to know the answers to these questions seldom pondered.
I'd like to know the reason for everything.
Is it too much to ask why I am here, how I exist and what made me throb in those first moments of conception?
Do I dare wonder how my cells gathered courage enough to grow?
Do I dare guess how my parents earned a blessing so intimate?
I'd like to think my poems can seep into catatonic veins and make mountains with my words,
Is it too bizarre to believe the world may someday stop turning,
That it may reverse, and all of time will become corroded with processed steel and carbonated flesh?


I suppose I understand the methods of this flock.
I suppose I will follow as countless did before me.
"For the better", they bleat in monotonous drilling, chipping and cracking my weakened femurs,
And no longer can I continue like this.
I give in.
"I can't, you can't make me", I bleat, I cry so loud.
The trees plug their ears and watch each lifeless body
March over mine into the nuclear filled wasteland
And drink from its waters,
And the monster's tentacles slither around each sheep belly and drags them
In silent procession.
The lake ***** them dry and the radiation singes their woolen coats.
"For the better", they bleat
As the world falls down around me
And I am trapped with glass knocking me unconscious as it falls from San Diego to Chicago,
From Singapore to Moscow.
"For the better", I bleat, as I remember all the poems that smoldered to ashes before I put them on paper.

So I find my answer, too late to share with the others,
That yes, the world now halts its sluggish canter,
And the crunching of rock shudders beneath me,
And yes, the winds reverse, and we are moving backwards in a direction that never mattered to anyone other than me.
"For the better", I bleat, as the peak of the Chrysler building free-falls and splits my mind in two.
And all those prose, wandering and wispy,
Forever grow weight and sink into soil.