A dog is running after its own tail.
One minute a man sees
the next. He is awake again.
He is always waking.
It’s like this:
a glass full,
then empty.
No evidence of drinking.
In sleep there might be peace;
a longer narrative, sea air.
Holding a piece of chocolate,
turning it over and over,
each time new.
Is there life on Mars yet?
People are getting more cancers.
For thirty seconds, a story
from a TV show: the world
has stopped. He is still
moving. The eyes become
vessels for no one, an eclipse
of the spirit. Unblinking,
he waits to pause.
Semantic (write it down):
Thomas Edison. Eudemonia.
Seven Wonders of the World.
The Pi to the 13th Decimal.
Episodic:
The first time he meets his wife.
It was raining like today.
He has forgotten the taste of rain.
Procedural:
What the body desires
1. to waste
2. to take in
Briefly, lucid, metaphorical:
a pebble stuck in the middle
of an hourglass. An empty set.
Implicit:
Pin-pricked, the immediate
withdrawal of the hand.
Emotional:
He will refuse to be
touched.
Infantile:
Bottomless
The dog always rushing
to greet his master
even when gone
for mere minutes.
Nothing better than
[This moment]
Better than nothing
She brings him his piano sheets
and he could see with ears
the budding of a flower in full
bloom before it fades, unfolding
all at the same time
he and his wife are on their first trip
together: playing footsie in the sand,
the wind making her hair wild with dance,
the ruby pale swimsuit over a skyless
sun. Being, not suspended, breathing
the earliest beyond language:
how can I remember what I had
no words for? They are not enough
to describe her scent. In music,
a rest. In joking, cease the day.
In seriousness,
the only present is lonely
now.
His mother has passed a decade ago.
A pebble is inside a shoe. To forget
you once mourned, the hour must be
re-turned again and again.
For all one knows,
in those spaces,
is a God.