Asphyxiating from the noise

Of my past wrong actions,

Drowning in the debt of purchased goods,

Fettered to the compulsive whims of SaaS subs,

I am caught this morning in a human spun web.

Somehow I have mummified myself

In my own silk,

Preparation for

My own envenomation and

Extraoral digestion.

For it does feel,

Like the spider awaiting

The intestines of its prey,

That I am liquidated in

My own webbed casket

From where I have caught myself,

Awaiting to eat myself

At a future date,

My exoskeleton

Turned into pudding

So my pharynx

Can slurp myself up,

My old liquefied carcass

Nourishing my new self —

It all forever caught in

This orbicular webscape.

Netscape. Dream. 'Scape.

My eyes betray me and

Obsess on the beauties

Fleeting in my periphery.

A woman, perhaps,

Wearing antifit jeans,

Converse, a blazer.

Powerclash. So cool,

Yet professional. Confident,

Yet chill. Damn. Desire.

Casually in front of me.

I overtake thee. “Get behind me, Satan.”

Laughing. You fool.

What am I but also these things?

A man whose arms like trunks

Are toned. Swoll. A tattoo:

Poignant, somehow of nature.

He works out and I wonder,

“That’s a lot of reps. Where do you, good sir, find the motivation and time to carry-on with so much body building while my puny self is satisfied with a mere push-up here, pull-up there?”

A child sits

Knees-tucked-to-the-chest

On a gate chair by terminal two.

So nimble. So casually flexible.

Desire even this.

A sparrow swoops in

To feed on the insects

By the door. So swift.

So stress free

Despite my worrying about

How I’d ever be the one

To catch an insect

In my mouth while

Swooning through

Tight quarters.

At twenty-eight thousand

The pilot takes us down

To smoother air

Between the outflow boundary

Of neighboring incus clouds,

Left and right, where we bounce

Hundreds of feet at a time,

A silent prayer:

“If this is death, thank you, Lord, for this good privilege to be a human; and better, a human who has remembered Thee somewhat. Follow me in this next life. Don’t keep me from Me as you did for so long in the middle years of this life, a decade’s drought between confirmation and psychiatry of vowing ‘God is dead.’ I can’t bare the moments where I have forgotten Thee. Even now is shambles, but thank you, Lord, for this chance to appreciate life as we tumble through the skies contemplating death. I don’t think we’re going to die, but if we do, what a ride. What a ride.”

Out there to the west,

The sun is giving paradise.

All we see from our angle

Through the fuselage port

Is an orange-melon gradient

Spilling across faraway clouds.

You know — you think you know —

That those pilots are getting high

On the beauty of that sky,

The rest of us,

Shades down

To stop the glare

On our seatback displays,

Watching the news,

The Masters, or

The show that ends for us

Before The End for us,

Having prematurely

Reached our gate.

Beauty, beauty everywhere.

I’m doing it again,

Walking through

The infinite thoroughfare of

The world’s busiest airport,

Surreptitiously spying

Eyes, that furtive glance

With a beautiful stranger.

My eyes betray me

Looking for beauty

Out there

When

The joy

I crave

Is in here.

Channel, channel, channel

That you once have been

The woman whose body curves,

The man whose muscles bulge,

The bird whose wings glide,

The sky whose clouds

Are wondrously effervescent blush,

Simultaneously caustic gray,

Violent pangs of Tron-green lightning,

Dun as far as the horizon sees.

Channel, channel, channel

That you have once been

What it’s been like

To have been

The bend in the river,

The leaf upon the tree,

The tree,

The chair beneath the bower,

The shade and the light,

The chiaroscuro,

The canvas,

The art and

The artist.

How much longer

Must I long

For what I am

No longer

But still am?

It pains my eyes,

My ears,

My hands

To only caress

My love,

To only admire

My love,

To only listen

My love. I the feeling

Is never satisfactorily

Close enough. I am not

Close enough. I am not.

The recognition that

I am not. Only I am.

Only I. I love I.

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