megafauna (a prose poem)

saying goodbye to the top of your eyelids.  closing your sleeping tongue and locking your soul door on the way out.  swimming down your nonsense towards everything and knowing i won’t go back.  the sun is bright and warm.  one thousand coffee cups are being melted down into a perfect cellophane shield.  we will survive.  seas are raging waves are crashing my house didn’t make it yours won’t either.  each second eight thousand species go extinct, bacteria and tree frogs dying in ultraviolet and burning in micro, each with a tiny prokaryotic vision of how they’d go and this wasn’t it, this wasn’t how they planned.  imagine trying to shoot yourself and all you get is the heat death of the eventual universe.  imagine imagining your headstone and a hundred other hylidae in black suit and tie crying.  imagine imagining them imagining what you could have been.  stepping off your porch and it’s disappearing into ash in a confused molecular traffic jam.  nobody plans for these things.  walking down the street in a pair of polished wingtips while the cosmos whine and shriek.  my tailored business suit.  i liked to pretend i was a spy some days.  i told you i’d come back, always come back to you.  i feel drenched, ensconced, engendered.  i feel you in me, i feel.  i feel everything.  i feel everything.  i’m burning and there are stars in the sky it’s mid-morning. 

glass drips down the sides of every bank and investment firm.  endless men dressed like me squirm and shuffle and gasp their way into everything else.  they played with monopoly money until the money ran out.  they wore clothes fit for any foolish emperor.  nobody plans for these things.  they lived like time wasn’t going to run out like they could buy that too, like they could shed life like a snake and slough off the human condition.  like they could lease out the extra to some sucker with wide eyes who wouldn’t ask enough questions.  there are never enough questions.  we never asked enough, you never asked enough of me, emergency news bulletins fry in the everywhere sun.  what sense was there in implying time or ownership?  we act like anything is ours and endlessly.  we learn from never our mistakes.  we love each nobody other always. 

where were we when we began?  from the minute we’re born we’re elsewhere.  i was born drenched, ensconced in mucus, burnt and branded by a business school with beautiful autumns and no ambition.  i inherited a legacy of numbers and tasteful ties and conference calls.  we don’t have destiny.  we don’t have permanence, we have life on loan from clouds and kinder atoms.  you and i were age-old questions and gentle giggling riddles that smirked at truckstop waitresses and summer lifeguards,we were choking for years on the salty steam rising off of the everywhere with a hiss and a squeal,we were your grandmother’s smile in warsaw, and we were her smoke in dachau…  we were pieces and parts,we were eraser marks on blueprints and the penny on the tracks,we were everywhere and always and for whatever reason