11.5.00

Walking the numbered streets when the body sighed and the warmth dropped from your thighs to the earth. You uttered, It's over. A 36-day life exhaled to make room for another. All the energy that surged through the diapason given up to the brisk November air. Now your body, cleansed, offers you the cup and you take it. Thirty-six days, one life of many perhaps. What inconsequence will this one become? Like the others, lost and suspect apparition? This one is no different than every other incarnation along the way to some indiscernible end. How many more? Till we get living right? No, that is fallacy. We receive not the eons promised—the chances spanning contrived notions of centuries or hereafter—but months, minutes. It's no matter to the firmament, the universe simply does not keep the record by our time. Lives roll onward relentlessly and every beginning startles for the ending it implies. Each one feels like it is the last. Yet it is always the first one too, when never having felt it before you knew what it was and thought to yourself, even in such youth, Now my life begins. Not a kiss could bring him forth into this new existence, nor clutching him to the very center of creation and willing his ichor to find vessel there. Immortality is leaving him behind like this and the void is the thread that puckers time. You, older now, drink from the cool amniotic air and begin, Lived a life that was 36 days, and yes, built a love that was over an hour.

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