The Thump of a Drum

There are no rules –
no modifiers for the quanta
no meaningful loops – nothing
is fair, much less balanced.
The mindless cosmos is
totally skewed; the dead rot;
the good get punished;
the bad do not.
Every tribe and kind
numbers men able
to bayonette infants.
Every civilization
ultimately sucks.
.
And then there’s Nature –
ah, behold the hosts of golden posies –
where roots of titan trees conspire
to splice and strangle hapless worms,
where bugs hide their myriad eggs
in other bugs, so darling progeny
may feast on the host bug alive –
vivesection or pablum?
God’s creation?
You betchya.
.
There are no rules. None.
And how much courage
does it take one lunatic
just to face it. And
how many lunatics
would it take to give
sanity a reprieve?
And how many lunatics
are loose on the planet ?
And how many lunatics
can dance on the head of a pin?
?
And so …unable to be just crazy
we shrink away and invent
.
SOME SEMBLANCE OF ORDER
.
Grace notes, key signatures
yin/yang balances, heavens, hells,
reincarnations, limbos (the mind
is such an agile accident) when
life is just the thump of a drum.
.
Maybe that is the worst –
Ice cream cone telescopes
finding nothing but exploding
suns and who really cares – no,
who really gives a fuck
about exploding suns
.
The only reprieve – the sole
stinking sustainable solace
to be found anywhere –
must be scratched
out of the binding
of one soul with another,
the sweaty fusion of one body
with another – and if you are
just ace fucking lucky
the scratching and the fusing
aren’t merely repeatedly
tangential or sequential
and there aren’t always
half a dozen mismatched
shrieking fractions – misbegotten
litter – on the lover’s bed.
.
That’s all there is, the luck
of the draw, the living and the dead.
The thump of a drum – that’s all.
.
!
.
Noted in the margins? Let me catch my breath first/