Praise to the Being
not to be called God
for that is understood
as a Noun and not
a Verb
by too many
and it should be known by all
that this is praise for the entirety
of All, its ongoing
Going, its Movement
and Shifting Nature;

praise be to Being, then,
to grouching and farting
at daybreak before work,
to loneliness of the unemployed
facing the emptying streets,
to the words “what exactly shall I do today?”
and the words “I wish I was doing anything else,
not what I am doing now or
am about to do,” praise to the chance
of change or the comfort of no change;

praise to the dead of last night
who are beyond the new things
of this morning, who are Elsewhere;

praise to the positive
who fool themselves, the negative
who fool themselves, the ones
who are not thinking at all today
but who move solely in response;

praise to the calculation
of the middle aged man
who looks at his life and decides
there are maybe fifteen years left in it,
who decides to live as he has been
because he is glad of the short term;

praise to the calculation
of the middle aged man
who looks at his life and decides
there are are maybe fifteen years left in it,
and decides that it is not enough,
and sets his coffee down and goes outside
and walks to the corner, is winded, goes back
to the living room and knows he’ll do more
tomorrow, who believes again
in tomorrow;

praise to the Internet
and its fallacies, its snap judgments
and foolish conspiracies, its reinforcement
of the worst, its stupid cats
and moments of connection facilitated
by the dumb video, the effervescence
of a spoiling joke, praise always
to the moment as revealed and removed;

praise to the things we always forget to praise
and cannot recall now, but they exist and do not fail
to appear at the right moments, they know
when they are needed, come through phone calls
and unexpected visits, letters, odd news stories,
mentions by random strangers, trashing of old yearbooks
and bills from vacations forgotten in the rush of Being;

praise then for that Being, for all Being known and unknown;

praise for disgust at slipping through the cracks,
for shame at crossed fingers on rent day, for joy in ten-dollar prizes
on lottery tickets, for rage at celebrity,
politics, terror alerts and body searches,
for imprisonment of whole generations of our own;

praise for the privately balled fists of the pacifists;

praise for the soldier cradling his enemy’s child
after killing the enemy;

praise for the moldy bread
in the mouth of the stray, for the tinfoil hat,
for the long shelves of pills illuminated by sunrise
through the narrow apartment window;

praise for the silence in which only Being exists
and for the stark fact of another day
exactly like the last one,
exactly like the next one;

praise for the Being of Being itself
and its sacred and profane wind
that is like unto the breath of the beating wings
of the Angels we are
as we trumpet in hope of the End of Days
again and again
until the Days indeed end
as if there were only days, no history,
no progress;

praise at last and again and always for Being,
simple and dear in the light of Order
that appears as Chaos
but is magnificent in its
sealed completion.