Your straining mountain smile
gives away your flowing magma regret.

This surgery exists to explicitly
remove vocal chords,
because they sing of the wilting
trail of apocalyptic smoke which binds us.

This is the future,
when we must excise the taint
of all the dirty blood fingers.

How the thunderous verbal attack
of our dishonesty tastes disturbingly sweet,
disturbingly sweet.

We are shaking our children loose
from their places,
and the rotting of their teeth
comes from such a joyful place.

When all the pinprick desires
are hoisted in buckets of cool disdain
into their eyes
into our eyes,

then this holy decomposition
will reveal charcoal silhouettes
of when we were all babies.

And hell no this is not
what anyone wants but our collective
skinlimbs and thrusting hips make it so.

Displaced from the simple comprehension
and stability of wandering tribes
and familiar, circular families
(where you knew your neighbors' faces
and it kept you and them from cutting
each other in places that kept on bleeding)
we fumble with grace until finally we return,
rejoined into the night-disfigured palace of space.

We all bear the blood spots of darkest reproach
as the earth silently awaits the engulfing sun,
and a million human-made chemicals rise up
and reek revolution.

Emissions of individual CFCs
multiplied by their Global Warming Potential;
Co2s multiplied by all our failed marriages,
by every decaying corpse that was killed
by our selfish need for enemies.

Fists thrown into the darkness.
Fists thrown into the darkness.

We hit the monsters we do not see.
In the stealth of unlightened hearts,
they are not babies, nor sons or daughters,
but the evildoers, the dismantled faces
of demons: all put back together in the dirty
brown faces of white-skinned dreams.

26 light years at 186,000 miles per second
is a tiny step in the cosmos but
how it crushes us into insignificant specks,
if only for that instant when the nihilism spikes
into our flickering eye light.
(How it reeks of reality.
And how we HATE it for that.)

If there are such things
as the laughter of children and the pained geometry
of newborn toes, why would the universe blanket
us with uncaring?

Yet you must make a choice
and utilize your animal instinct
of darkness-immersion just to believe in god,
to ignore the 7 billion trumpets aflame
with the tumbling evidence of a crumbling humanity.

But wait, in the silence, in the overflowing darkness
of our hearts, is that not laughter?

Is that the unstoppable incantation of true prayer -
the kind only present in the pressing soul-communication of music?

Ah, yes. It is so. We lose but win.
The light of space is in our hearts.

The atoms from a billion suns flow through the many-flowering
molecules of our bodies (veins, blood, bone, brain).

The journey is a harsh dream filled with memories.
A baby universe inside of a trillion larger universes.

It was not our fault that we failed,
as every life form ever created by
the steady hands of evolution has only ever bathed
in the selfish love for its own genes, its own hungry mouth.

How many times in this life has the thunderous
pull of a smile, or a burst of laughter,
or a pang of regret, turned you involuntarily
into a warm and knowing animal?

You smiled, or laughed, or cried.
But indeed, you were living!

You stood there, below all that earth-swallowing space
and your silhouette was burned into history.

At least once, and maybe a thousand times,
you released yourself into loving;
you were bandaged, cut, drunk with living,
but somehow you overcame.

(And if that isn't beautiful,
then I'll just sit here
silently awaiting my return to space,
the final decay when the cordoned-off starstuff
of my skull-bound heart simply:
returns.)

12/08/2004

Posted on 12/08/2004
Copyright © 2026 Tom Goss