pretend space is a backdrop painted for earth; since the moon is

gray like a photograph charading memory; using language

empty as a hologram; as though the stars are a breadcrumb trail to heaven; as what escapes

from insomnia-begotten days on an unnumbered calendar; with anyone under

the sun’s administration of shadows; above a world with contests for crowns, over

-taking silence in the marketplace of noise; if our common science underwrites

temples in strip malls and cars that drive with no one at the wheel; as the origin of

contracts signed with invisible hand; without formulae for entropy in

bodies resting to be rested for work; as if the universe clamors for

relative values and quarterly forecasts, credit advances and capital gains

taxes on the dead, what claims the dead surrender; aside from the void that distinguishes

everything observable; since I can’t afford the ex-

communication from work; if no one present longs for

change of breath or perspective; without position and scope to see

galaxies devouring each other, suns dying to embody the dark; nor

the stakes in a tangle of data, the red exit glaring; yet what is left to say after

the land’s lesson that pressing up against another is a fault; after everyone plays

tonight’s dissonant symphony of fork and knife on bone; at the risk of learning

there is no beyond while god’s own hand draws the curtain back; because

every silence is not an invitation,

company diminishes, and that cosmic, impossible mouth shifts to yawn,

like the cat who drops at someone’s heel the fresh kill she wants for herself.