In life, I thought my job to follow
the to do list, complete
items with maximum
efficiency. Log tasks.
Enter numbers. Earn bucks
to lay against the fright
of not having, the disabled
organ, robbing
of prospects, laying
in of senectitude.
We all know the one
who slogged hours,
grim briefcase, whose
lines of code, advertising
type, became the letters
on the headstone. The woman’s
stilled forehead,
shot with Tox,
the chill of placid
marble on the tablet.
Oh, but let mine—
corpus of everything
I’ve ever done, all left behind—
be explosion,
be burning.
Let mine be a pyre.
Let it incinerate, this form
of skeleton, hooked lightly
to muscle; the viscera, delicate,
somehow held within, for decades,
(if fortunate) against crash of car,
riddle of bullet. Let it burn, rip
this temporary union to branch—
into a million starlets, like the fork
of neurons or how interclusters
of galaxies filament into one another.
Let me be that disruption. Formless
as in the void, connective.
Let it—the it that was me—be dispersed.
(Do not, friend, drag me in that hearse.)
Don’t keep me in the urn,
for god’s sake, no. Let me be urnless.
Let there be no place to visit.
Let’s agree upon that. Yes?
Let us be lessoned how it is, finally,
to be without membrane: that bliss
those who worship—through hands pressed,
eyes upturned, with implorations—sought:
that joining
in the palms
of the infinite, who has
no hand.
Let all quarrels be lessened.
From the hovering cloud perspective:
those who seemed my nemeses
were but sucklers of my evolution.
Sudden inrush of forgiving.
God, they held me to their breast!
For them, a gratitude. Forgiveness.
In opposition, there can be no opposition.
(Why not earlier? Then:
forgiveness even of this.)
Let all rifts, upheld with victim
and the wronger, be as none.
Let me in this life begin this practice.
Let the goddess of chaos
descend, eager
vulture await on highest branch,
to tear all temporary form apart.
Let us be sundered from one another.
Let me be mere particulate, rattle,
become the stuff of matter:
cells, molecules. Immanent,
the spirit that moves in every
thing. At once tiny and grand.
Nanophoton, yet expansive.
Husked from identity.
Entered into the wide open that,
in those dreams, I always trekked
toward, repeated motif.
Let me be released from any motive
but pure being, humble, that pulse.
Thank the blessed circumstance
of shift. Pivot
into it.
Let me be
no thing.