Originally posted 3/30/2013.

Amid the conventional people
and everyday happenings
on my street, something, perhaps

a blue whale, has passed
through the air
behind me.

I turn
once it has gone
and see only

conventional people and
everyday happenings.
I sense something

I have been missing for decades
has just brushed me,
and I want to weep,

but only with someone else
who felt it as well.
I cannot weep alone for this,

because one man
weeping alone
is no way to offer praise

to whatever has made
such things,
to whatever

has seen to it that things exist
which, though unseen,
are nonetheless deeply known.

Originally posted 11/29/2011.

Open the car window at
eighty miles an hour. 
Cars peel off behind me

until the highway’s
empty. No one 
is going my way. 

The city forty miles ahead.
The sky, orange
over deepest black.

Rumors of riot and fire all day.  
It’s the end of the world, some say,
but no one wants proof except me.

How foolish, how
odd that is — to
just curl up and die

or hide in the boondocks
without seeing for yourself?
In fact, how can you even flee

when you consider this world?  
Maybe that’s the best of all possible
pyres up ahead.

Stuck my fingers
into wounds once, long ago,
to prove to myself

that the world wasn’t ending
after all.  Why wouldn’t I
do this? It worked out last time so

I gun it.  I go.
I’ve always been the one
who has to know.