I am a scared animal
waking to this strange world,
in a manner so similar
to the account at the outset
of Swann's Way

Any ridiculous sense
of confident recognition
is illusive,
and how queer
the attached, unavoidable fear
of passing
from a world
where you so slowly grew
your fraudulent consciousness,
out of nothing

Why does a nothing ahead
seem worse
than a nothing passed?

It's just greed,
a useless craving
you became carelessly accustomed to,
and took on as a habit

Each morning is an acceptance
of your limbs,
your name
and your history,
in no way qualitatively differing
from a birch's or an aspen's acknowledgment
of branches and leaves;
a wild Merleau-Pontyean
phenomenology of perception,
over again,
until you loose yourself (your self)
into the foggy freedom of dementia
or the wonderful relief of pain
of the unrestricted medication
of palliative care

Every last piece of furniture
and kitchenware
has its time of reckoning
around you,
superfluous as it may be,
and “I” is just a dressed-up
household word
with a numb echo

The innermost character
of yourself
is just a pitiful guesswork
of a cosmic identity crisis,
strapped across swarms
of small wonders

Small wonder, then!

You are antecedentia,
you are previous,
you are a passing symptom,
a building up
being brought down

Ah, I hear the rain
talking back to my sunny speech,
as I drive my words
in a Springsteenean turnpike burn-out
up the ass of reason!

(I never did ask for this,
and now that I'm here,
the anger builds)

You are just a method
that evolution uses
to try out the senses,
and your appearance
is just a composition
of functions,
from head to toe

You're a madly fooled nothing,
an eat-and-shit machine
with an intellectual afterglow
grinding on;
a mechanical end game,
fucked-up and forlorn,
rising out of nothing;
a next-to-nothing
scared of next nothing!

Fool!

At long last you have to let go
of the reins of your unkempt flesh;
let your body float out
like a jellyfish,
urine and excrement and vomit
and uncontrolled gurgles
filling your last days
with nurses' disgust,
evil angles with dirty feet
descending
through your hallucinations
to amplify your unholy horror
in the stinking forecourt
of next-to-nothing,
your last will
already carefully evaluated
by ignorant heirs;
your suits and mountaineering equipment
being hung away for good;
your literate thoughts stacked in your desk
committed to the flames
of your tiled stove;
your version of the world
and all your fuck-lore
filed away,
smart ass!