There’s a vibrant undercurrent
to our daily existence.
It’s an unspoken thing, a kind of
flowing zeitgeist made up of all the
outlines of objects that break up the
bare blue bellows of the sky.
The treeline flows up from the ground,
the cars zip across the cold uncaring pavement,
and your eyes and my eyes buzz past it all,
taking in what we will and calling it life.
That’s all life is, which -pow- arrives like
a car crash, no one ever sees it coming, or sees it
coming to this,
but at that instant the perfect crystal structure of the story that you told,
the good one, the one that might as well be your life itself,
makes a crunching sound of crumpled bumper.
It makes a crashing, creaking cry of defeat against
the sad indifferent sky of replete confusion,
and is forever extinguished.
What will you make of yourself now?
You’ll craft a new artifice from the throbbing subtext
of the beauty and tragedy around you.
I’ll do it too.
But will we be any better off, rinse and repeat?