Your laugh quick as a flash of light

But moods dark as the sea

And always with that biting humor

You bit too much outta me.

Billions of years ago,
Before language and iPhones and photosynthesis,
Before God and sin and war,
Before cars and Paris and capitalism,
Life began with a separation.

A single cell of unknown origin
Deemed itself worthy of infinite reproduction
And cut itself off from a world
Totally alien to ours (but the same).

It erected a membrane; a shield;
A boundary between itself and the great,
Dark unknown of chaos and calamity
And, in doing so, banished us all to worldlessness.

Even now, the defining feature of the individual is the lack:
We awaken one day and realize we are not our mothers.
We are not our fathers or siblings or friends,
And we are not QUITE our own reflections in the mirror.

This first, great trauma exists as a reenactment of life
Tearing itself from the universe to make a new whole.
This first, great trauma births an individual being
Constantly in search of a universal it can never return to.

This first, great trauma is why I sit in my well-furnished
And spacious apartment with food and AC and Netflix
And feel a great rift between who I am and what I know;
A condition created before life on Earth had barely begun.

Such power does a porchlight possess
That it lures a thousand insects
To fry in the dewy-white comfort of its glow

Where we see the mundanity of a helpful object
Moths see beckoning beams of moonlight
Like Icarus soaring too high at midnight

Perhaps God in all his alleged wisdom
Could never have imagined the horror wrought
By positive phototaxis and the electric lightbulb

Perhaps this whole **** world is the unintended
But deadly consequence of a God who could not
Predict the ways that lightbulbs and moonlight
Merge to Mock him.

In a 2013 study, human scientists wished to know
The depths of the heart of the common rat,
And devised an experiment to prove that
Empathy can exist even in the smallest of creatures.

The scientists, in their logocentric wisdom
Born out of centuries of Western philosophical tradition,
Metaphysical assumption, and scientific methodologies,
Trapped one rat in a tightly confined space and watched.

To their small-minded astonishment, the rats performed,
Again and again, the role of savior to their fellow rat.
They did this without need for compensation or compulsion
And, if given, shared the reward with their de-caged brethren.

But what the scientists failed to realize is, as is often the case,
That they themselves, with all their complex cognitive capacity,
Had failed an experiment which the rats navigated with ease.
For it was them who had caged the rat, and rats who set them free.

Grev ca the loqi el
Fel world sitram onj
(Is vetr yil eff)
Uner random eeja na
Wickreta and ilst
Unjust oli scon

Is my life isolation or a space for creation;
A gilded cage or a hideaway?

Shall I claw my way out or embrace desolation?

I live and eat and work alone—
There’s no one else who’s coming home.

I dare not dream to let one in
For fear my sliver may grow thin.
Best to keep to myself and rule it all,
And forget that my kingdom is unbearably small.

The crushing consideration
That maybe I wasn’t meant
To survive this storm

Or the scarier thought
That maybe the storm won’t come at all
And this will all have been for nothing