good night, america. tonight
you don’t matter. tonight you’re just
a shell around my room, and it’s cold out there.
i’ve got the heat up in here higher than i should,
too high to save the earth, keep it green and all that,
but it’s a small room after all and i’m cold.

good night, america. you’re a thin blanket tonight,
and the comfort you can offer me is just more rough fabric
on a tired hide. tonight i’m just another poor dog
far from home, wanting for nothing, really, but wishing
for so much more than this. it’s not enough for this
tired old pooch.

good night, america, i’m sure you’re something to see in the daylight
with your mountains and your majesty, but really,
when you’re always playing at being so far away, so remote, it’s all i can do
to remember half the words to the songs i used to sing you,
all that glory, those rockets, that flag. good night, america,
a man’s gonna die in this little room, maybe tonight, maybe later,
and it’ll be just another day for you, you and your spacious
and absent skies, so perfect if you look at them the right way.

Just now the light
flickered and the sound
of the dryer broke before
kicking in again, and

I began to wonder if these things
were real, or was I dead or dying
for one moment, the world I know
collapsing and then reexpanding

to its original size all in the course
of a single dimming.
It doesn’t matter now
as I am here, alive, and full and bright again,

but from now on I’ll be waiting for it to happen,
and when it happens at last I have to believe
it’ll be that swift — and I’ll have no flashlight, offer no fight
against the dark on that night; calm

as an old filament, I’ll just fall apart
and rest. It’ll be quick. The sound
will fail, the light will fail, and I’ll be sitting
in the dark, wondering what just happened.

Once they strap you in the electric chair
it’s only a matter of time
before the lightning becomes your advisor,
telling you this storm is of no consequence
as you go into the Light.

On the other side, you find
no one. No God, no Devil,
no deity wild or tame, no resting place,
neither cloud nor flame. All there is
is a droning in the dark, a song that keeps you guessing

for hours, perhaps days or decades —
who is that chanting for?
Is it your dirge, or perhaps your accusation come to haunt you
for eternity? Or are the angels simply telling you
that murder is murder, no matter how many laws

are made to explain it away? You will sit there
wondering for what back home you’d have called “forever”
before you meet the reason you’re here. When he comes up to you,
whole again as he was not when you left him
on the street back in the life before,

you are briefly terrified until you recall that nothing more
can happen to either of you. He sits beside you,
and that singing envelopes you, you join in,
but these are not your voices!
What is left inside you after death cannot sing the way you sang in life…

here, you are brothers. You killed him, he died, and all
is forgotten as you sit together waiting for the ones
who sent you here to join the chorus. It is not
for you to understand how you came to be here.
All you can do now is sit, sing, listen, and wait.

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.