There is a corpus alienum
under my breath;
a system
far beyond
any sensation of a Me
in a Myself

I breathe
and reach
for my pencil sharpener
while the corpus alienum embraces
all my prerequisites:

A whole Cosmos reaching
into my here and now
with countless details,
some so small and seemingly insignificant,
but with the lack of which
I'd be SOMETHING ELSE
in this projection
on the wall of our senses,
that C. G. Jung touches upon
in The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga
at his seminars of 1932

Memories
are mutated realities,
infesting the present
with existential distortions

My body
is a pile of firewood,
set to crack and wheeze
like the fire in the wood burner
at the farm

It will be a heated moment
when all my schemes
and intentions
dance off
in flakes of soot
and my skeleton explodes
like fireworks at
November's Guy Fawkes celebrations

and my poetic thoughts,
celebrating creation,
rising on the thermals
of cremation,
will twitter and whistle
like the song birds
of May

Oh, but I wish I'd be lit in India,
and not in this wintry North,
my soot rising high by the river,
under the stars and the moon,
in full view of people and gods,
and not claustrophobically locked
in a chamber
by some stranger,
bored on the horizon of events

...but then again,
bodily erasure
is the liberator from many ordeals
and the one holy gate
to the spaciousness of nothingness
beyond the gasp of the fire,
no matter if it flickers
'neath the nocturnal sky of the angels,
or roars in a human-made furnace

so I will ”go gentle into that good night”