Tag Archives: mortality

So long ago

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A poem written six years ago.

So long ago,
I got to know him well,
Always reaching, always looking
For a reason to keep living,

Even knowing
How alone we all are,
How he lived inside his head
Where no one could see the struggles,
No one could know how wrong they got it,
How, even he, in the end,
Gave up hoping for it
To change somehow,
Went from telling us how
To simply asking why.

Well, it’s a fair question, that.
Only, there can never be
An answer, no matter
How hard we stare
At the universe, demanding.

The universe only stares back,
Blankly.

Why had God forsaken him?

Why had he been so deluded
To think it would be different

From fear,
From loneliness,
From deception,
From illusion,
From cheap deliverance,
From intoxication,
From imagination?

Sitting and listening
To the sirens at night,
I imagine a million of them,
An endless stream of Jesuses
Asking the same question.

Why

Life in the coronaverse

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On the coldest day of winter
In the year of ‘47
I came to Earth squealing
Already suspicious of so abrupt
A beginning

Naked and poorly formed
Smeared with placental essence
Squinting and stammering
Unwilling and unable to
Participate but certain it was
A requirement

Not so different, it seems,
After all the years of days on end
From the rest of it
And those moments of delusion
When I was convinced I swam well
While nearly drowning
In the swell of living

Seven decades and change have passed,
And now, in this venomous year
Of maladies viral and visceral
Someone, like some great umbilical impulse,
Has left food at my doorstep
As I sit kicking the walls, dreaming
Of a light at the tunnel’s end

Between the sacred and the profane

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Between the sacred and the profane
there is not a sliver of difference.
We are luminous, we are crude,
we are crudely luminous, we

spill our lives into the sharp
vessel of time without a stray
moment left behind, without
an inch of depth undisturbed,

unperturbed, benighted as a breeze
in Hell, which, if we only knew it,
is Heaven held upside down to
let us trickle into new carnation.

Bah! I’m tired of this twaddle
of infinite souls to the manor
of eternity borne. The least is the best
of us, and the grandest star in the cosmos

destroys itself for our amusement.
The joke is that we are made of it.