Shit Epiphany

What joy to finally understand
that someday
we’ll have flowers growing
out of us, that
whether we become
ash or meat
it will happen one day that
we’ll all be green and happy
fodder, entering
mouths and departing through lower
intestines once
the blooms have dropped away,
and that means
we’re shit already even as we’re imagining
ourselves as future fragrance and
metaphor, even though we’re fated to be just
waste! It’s too good to be true,
we tell ourselves, that we will have such
a humble purpose.
We’ve wasted so much time and prayer
thinking we’ll be gods someday,
or hired hands of the gods, that when we finally see
that we’re individually of little value it’s as if
Jesus rose from the tomb and didn’t recognize us.
How comforting
to be at last forgotten and anonymous!
Once that’s over we can diminish ourselves,
cease fantasizing about our own
particularity as we secretly revel in knowing
that we’re just one of the innumerable warm left behinds,
ready at last to join the wide sea of
utility, to at last surrender
the folly of being so lonely, so
singular.