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Do you think of life as a walk
or more likely a march toward inevitibility

or do you think of it more like
a gradual spending-down of an accrued wealth

or as a building-up of dust leading to
a final shutting-down of the entire system

or even progressive molting until
the body is too big to support the heart

pumping away in its little birdcage
waiting to be set free when its owner kicks it

or is it a blush fading gradually
from the initial source of embarrassment

that is your parents coupling
in strangers’ bedrooms as terrible houseguests

or maybe our lives are themselves the measure
of the lifetime of the universe

each birth and death the ba-dump of the great
heart in the center of the sun

you can hear it if you listen very carefully
during non-peak times for radio transmission

it’s faint and easily lost in the wind of
everything else but it’s there

like birdsong high above the grind of traffic
in a large city on Monday afternoons

or the gasp of an orgasm underneath the march
of people rallying for a cause

or of death when it comes quiet as an arrow
and pierces all your armor

while you’re busy in the heat the literal
heat of battle and you fall down

and the fight keeps raging around your
empty frame it never stops does it