*
There’s someone under the dust,
the dust inside the blue warheads.
Someone whose hands used to shake,
who used to climb flagpoles
just to stick his tongue to the icy,
invigorating ball at the top, someone
who couldn’t stop that tongue
from getting into grooves where
tongues don’t belong. What can’t be
dealt with, can be medicated.
               And so what if
none of his ducts or sockets, no part of him
can open wide enough, not even the width
of a tear—
       if his pores are perfectly reduced
so that no living drop squeezes through.
Just dust. Or if, when he opens his mouth,
mushroom clouds
and other extinction-level-events fall out,
silent flakes settling on his shoulders, burying
his tracks, chilling what used to be
pain receptors or erogenous zones. So what?
If, from the ash, words rise like stars at 3AM:
     How that foppish orange curl
     tumbles across your forehead
     like a corkscrewing comet.


* *
Anytime we want to make something
permanent, we look heavenward
and attach it to God. See, it's ordained,
     so you don’t ever forget.
Make love forever, make children
so pieces of you last forever.
We never look down. What lasts
is that nothing lasts:
     not this entanglement on your loveseat
     after you’ve made me dinner
     and I just came here to talk.
Not your other flings—
more meteors, more debris burning as they fall.
If I were a rock in a vacuum, I’d want to fall
toward a larger hunk of spinning stone.
I’ll be that temporary line
of cosmic brilliance that makes you look up
and know you’ll get exactly what you wish for,
nothing more or less;
     so don’t waste me.


* * *
If we could travel just far enough—
maybe a bil-billion light-years away—
everything is repeated. We have other chances.
Everything there is stardust—unpackaged,
unprescribed, unsold, undone. Infinity stretches
in all directions. We laugh without cause; we love
without pre-destiny; we cry without reason.
     Neither we, nor our tears, are large enough.