I.

I cannot sleep
Here, it is 9 o clock somewhere outside of Philadelphia
on a morning in February, rotating a gradient closer, from this locale,
Towards the sun, gaining more light, which is shining
In big glaring streaks into my bedroom.
A plane has crashed in Buffalo, killing people
Who have done far more than I, have exposed genocide
And played symphonies in crowded rooms
They have deserved to see this sun, and be this fitful, rolling about,
Waiting for sleep but not really waiting
Savoring the cool flutter of fan propelled air
Drifting over their stomachs, pricking their bodily hairs,
But they are blackened and gutted, inert as clay
And the thought of plummeting is on my mind,
Plummeting and knowing, knowing, that your life
Is in its final seconds, and what is there to it, really?
Though we all know, but not with such imminence,
But if we stop to ponder it, and we don’t often
(a necessity to living)
We all know, and really at this non imminent death vantage
The question has the same reflective qualities:
What is there to it?

II.

Shakespeare is a stone in a chasm, kicked but a few meters
And Woolf is a mere pebble, chucked underhand a foot or so
Me, then, a flake, an infinitesimal flake, of mica
Fluttered about haphazardly in a breeze much too strong,
Fighting against it but failing and static until my diaphanous being
Gets broken into something unseen
And though matter is neither destroyed, nor created,
We must go somewhere, come from somewhere,
Unless we have all been here from the outset
Will be here until the end
(and why I ask are our memories so short?
I want mine to be long, peppered with the twirl of expanding galaxies
And imploding quasars, grown dull with brown dwarfs dimmed,
And how, fucking how, are they so bright then so not,
How do they know when to cease, and why can I not remember
My first glimpse of a supernova, my first brush with a black hole?)


III.

Think of this while lying in bed
10,000 years ago we were but guttural yelps
Blunt objects to the head, mining marrow
Hanging all naked and bare with some precognizant premonition,
Necessity of community, or warmth and touch,
Knowing to eat and sleep and shit and fuck,
We knew nothing, not to communicate, or comprehend
All those glittering spheres above when light went out
(though God knows we didn’t call it light…what the fuck was light before the word?
Did it have the same qualities then?)
But then we knew everything, or enough
And now, one drop more in some ocean of existence,
We can wire every inch of this globe
It took single cells a couple billion years to conglomerate,
Fish a couple hundred million more to walk,
And what in God’s name did the dinosaurs do
For all those millions of fucking years they were here?
We needed a mere ten thousand to scuttle about
And learn to write, and then build,
To map the days, figure out our uncontrollable cosmic spin,
Invent Gods and wage wars over them, build cities and bury them,
Then build more, and to write poems, and novels,
And just think of everything we’ve done in ten thousand years,
Then think that all of it will be buried some day, pulverized
By inanimate rock, or maybe just dissolved by our dying sun,
But still, nothing is destroyed, so where in God’s name
Will the coliseum be when the sun sputters and bloats,
Laps its cosmic heat (made from the same carbon as you and I,
Though neither of us can destroy star systems, let alone civilizations, with a belch)
Out in great hurtling explosions, and wouldn’t it be something to see?
Please, I am begging you to ponder this next week,
In between American Idol and the Nightly News.
I know what you’re thinking: wake me when we can wire those fucking quasars at the edge of the universe


IV.

When I say edge of the universe, I suppose it is not a literal term
Because there can be no edge when there is no precipice
Matter doesn’t simply stop, whoops, dropping off some sheer face
It goes, and goes, and goes some more, and it does not begin
Or end, it is simply there, taking up space inside space
So edge is more a contextual term, one for context
Because we are all about context, though what are we putting
Anything in context against?
This is in context against there being no context,
Against those guttural bastards who fucked indiscriminately
Way back before we had context, context which allows us to
Build skyscrapers half a mile, to fly (we can fucking fly! Think about that, please,
We can fucking fly!), to love, and contemplate fucking flying,
And really that is what this is about, it’s about sticking it
To all that space out there, with its infinite nothing grin, saying
Please, Justin, put me in context, wrap your brain around me,
Give it your best try, and this is me saying
Go fuck yourself, because last night I listened to my father
Play saxophone, and turn red in the face, and my mother dance
With little abandon, all bright and out of control,
Not thinking about quasars or infinity, not knowing they will die, and I will die,
Life boiled down to movement and sound, the press of tongue,
All rough and rutted and drying, to reed, reverberating,
No different from those waves that created all this, the same energy
Universal creation and music, one and the same, and my father plays those waves
And my mother flails her arms to them, and I watch and sip beer,
Think how long it has been since I’ve been in love, eye up the Greek woman
In green, her breasts full and hanging with age, wondering if she’d fuck me,
But back to my father, he is so in love, and my mother, she is so blithely beautiful
And now you, infinite bastard, making us finite creatures so quaint,
I want to tell you here is your context, dare you to swallow this up,
And I do this knowing full well you will take me up on it, and you will win


V.

Tomorrow, I am going to buy roses and give them to a woman
Who lives alone and believes in God, who will die soon, I think,
Leaving no trace she was ever here, and in sixty years
It will be as if she never existed, yet she did exist, she is here,
And she will smile at my roses, and I will feel like a good man
Though I know such a definition is impossible, because
What barometer is there for good, really, in such a relative universe,
Where not even time, the one thing we can all measure on the surface, is consistent?
I will keep one rose, I think, and put it on the door step of a girl
I have no business loving, or even intimating loving,
And I want so badly for her life to be repetitive, to come back
So that it can be reflected and made real, because she is so beautiful
With this wonderful wide mouth, and a brain that understands perspective,
Knows it will die, and wishes like hell it wouldn’t, a brain
That desperately wants to live because there are so many inches of earth
She will never touch with her own feet, so many people
She will never pass and decide not to love, but this is holding on,
I fear, because really it is me that feels this, and how can I know
What her brain is capable of, or anyone’s but my own,
And what mine says is I do not want to die
Because I want to dance with my mother to my father’s music,
And litter the front porches of young girls with roses,
And feel the touch of a finger on my spine for the first time in months,
My God it is better than sex, that intimate graze that says
Bring me closer, please, don’t let me go yet, please
There is sun yet to blind my eyes on the morning’s snow,
There are sand dunes to be mounted, all grainy and warm
And working into your toes, and under your nails, and
In your hair so that you wake up and it is all over her pillow
And between her teeth when you kiss her, and there is
That feeling when I pass by your house and remember
Watching your thighs, all dimpled and sinewy and tan,
Churn and pump in front of me with the sounds of a
Waterfall in my ears, though I am only now noticing it
Because it lulls with the susurrant sound of endlessness,
And now goddamnit that feeling is back, and it makes me wonder
How we ever let go of love, or of life, how we could be made
In such a way that we are able to give this all back,
How we surrender all this to a universe unable to
Comprehend its own beauties, it is so unfair
That the one permanent thing in all this creation
Is unable to look itself in the eye, and fall in love
With a thick hipped girl, or the sun dappled ground
Beneath an oak tree in May, because then maybe it would say,
I’ll let you all stay a while, but infinite matter
Has no such mind, and instead it sits there inert in its understanding, dumb as fuck,
Inexplicably vast, enabling us to gaze up and wonder
At how in the hell there is no end to this space, and no beginning,
Because all we know, all we can understand as humans, are endings