mmmdcclxii

Connecting Some Dots

I’ll not hide within this burg
of words, which is such an

inclination here of late that,
although I speak and speak

when happenstance has
placed me face to face

or throat to throat with
an occasion to utilize

my larynx in some
engaging way—one must

remain hopeful these forlorn
days—but not a word of me.

So it is not as if I have
a thing at all to hide,

it’s just I couldn’t help
you even if I tried. It

seems the longer my span
of days on this planet, the

more I glean, supposedly,
about the earth’s vast surface,

which, I seem so distantly to
recall, grows smaller every

year that I survive. It matters
not if it is one spent trudging

ever forward over endless
scorched land at a horizon

that my senses fail to see
even one hint of change

or one wherein I’m floating
at the surface of the sea

or gliding high above
some combination of

both and in such scathing
desolation never seeming

to arrive, not even knowing
where my destination, and

this as I toss but pleasantly
this way and that as if I’m

hammocked or else gliding
slowly, singularly as if

a hungry hawk up
in the blue-green sky.

But all the while an
education happens

as a life of clues accrue,
and I have picked up

on my way to nowhere
countless keys that each

unlock some mystery of this
universe and its inhabitants,

but who I am or ever were or

whom it was that with all this

living I must have ever and
in earnest intended to be

come, all of what I must
have certainly thought

at some point very
long ago I might have

and assuredly known 

about that person has all but

dissolved, has vanished like 

an ancient glacier that

has melted into subsumed
sustenance for some all-

consuming or perhaps
more deified or evolved

whole, or else has gasified
into the atmosphere like

that rare downpour does
in what feels like no time

at all, into mere vapor,
until I am left wondering

whether perhaps I’ve only 

justarrived, or else have been

here all along, or maybe

I punched out at some

immeasurably distant time 

ago to head for good from

this revolving spot wherein

I’m stuck.  This treadmill is a 

dream-like consciousness,

perhaps, that follows through

death into whatever
happens to be next—

and this amnesia,
all this silence

that slips ever deeper
into the mysterious

ahistory of my story
is my only solace.