Everything I’ve Learned

That I am nothing.

That as nothing, I am exalted
to be nothing. Deliciously
inconsequential, a part of the Machine
of Stars/Necklace on
Neck of Creation.

That I
mean so little anything is free
to hold me.

That I am peer
of leopard and dysentery,
of coconut palm and stray wrapper.

That the pattern of rejection/containment
is the warp of my woof.  Woolly headed
and slubby as a pilled cardigan
on a grandfather’s back, only here
for the warmth.

That I am song
under shower breath.

That I will be
forgotten and this gladdens the non-ego
that fights my stick-wielding caveman heart.

That love and robbery holler equally
in the alley of my elbows as I grasp
the always coming always receding days
I bore through in anger and dread and joy.

That joy itself is movie written by another
but I imagine myself as grip and gaffer at once
upon its set.

That the skin I’ve stretched
and the blood I’ve pressurized
will look awful
when I go, bowels a roaring ghost
of past indiscretion, face a sagged charlie horse
in a leg of a loved one long after my burial,
putting a hitch in their walk.

That every barking tree limb in a forest
laden with ice knows its place better than I do
and I am happy to listen and learn.

That a man’s
no more human than a tin can on a heap of worms
and that the whine of a bomb is a natural song
of the city of God.

That I am happy
and nothing, all is nothing, since all is everything
and nothing at once

it must be so that nothing is important and
nothing stands out, importance itself
is the Ganges of my fierce greed
and I will burn myself to ash and crackle
in the consummation of The Wheel
as the last thing I say to another
is swallowed in the Great River
and I am lost to the sun and the voice
and the Necklace that hangs upon the neck of Creation
will be my shade against the long night
of what comes after this life,

the night of knowing how small I was
and how much I offered to Completion
by simply being what I was:
a petty, magnificent animal.