All matter doesn’t matter. Which is hard to believe
when two years I sat wedged
in a corner office stapling papers and prying
them open. I was used to it. Used to
compiling edge to lascivious edge.
At week’s end I went to the cask like everyone else.
What I inhaled was the body asking for less
of the squeamish world. As if I’d been told how, I inhaled
what some called a daily paradise which was just talk for what would later
have to empty out. The possible names of grandeur
back then were allegories. Now I drink in the formation
of clouds. The Big Bang unspun, pressing scenery
everywhere. I never believed in the rapture. Falling down
evening now. On an old balcony I speak with a woman in black
about how life is only houses and gain, bleeding, procedures
and smoothing. Only chronology.
I’ll still go to the beautiful places, the ruins.
Watch me rummage all of this
underside. God, how we’ve gussied up now
with the future’s peroration. Captivated
as we are by the careening. Watch me leave
footprints across the faulted west and not stop
asking for what began.