the big questions

does secretly keeping an eye on me
make the hungriness go away?
does knowing about my insides
answer all of your questions?

does it quiet the noises in your head
that keep you up at night?
or do they pounce when you break the surface
of each waking repetitive day?

have you ever heard the night confessing
sharing its deathbed regrets?
does it throw a volatile little-boy tantrum
when you ever so politely decline?

would it surprise you to look inside a well
and meet a familiar pair of eyes?
will the shock of the unexpected
make it any less of a hole in the ground?

do you worry about all that is lost out at sea
hoarded in its folds so they never return to shore?
do you secretly believe maybe all of those things
are perhaps not so unlucky at all?

do you cry while watching the daily news
because you never learned how to cry for yourself?
or do you automatically fast forward all the way through
so all that is left is the weather?

can you remember the last time the sun
warmed your face
without needing you to draw it into the sky
with a child's set of washable markers?

do you really believe any answer exists
before it has been discovered?

there is nothing more desolate
than the littered fairgrounds
the morning after the anima of the passing carnival
has been inhaled into the tenacious clay of the night
the faint impressions
and incomplete clues of renounced belongings
all that remain of what once may have existed
(or perhaps
had been dreamed all along)

and no good place to start making any sense of it all
except for a beginning without a beginning
and a persistent feeling of something unresolved
that just.
won't.
leave you alone.

and then there's that famous story about
that magnanimous guy
who thought he could keep all his little ones safe
if he bound them by their shoes to the earth

but he neglected to calculate the possibility
that nobody likes hanging upside down for
damn near the entirety of their lives.

and that's where the story left off...

if i told you the world would end today
would it be enough to move you to find me?
or is it never the time to seize the courage
to just ask the questions
you don't really want to have answered?

(well if you want to know
i could tell you now
but you're just gonna call me a liar)


it's gravity, baby.

the answer to all questions.

there's nothing here but
plain
old
simple
gravity.

and whole lotta old folks
waxing nostalgia
languidly rocking in homemade porch swings
that never seem to figure out how to stop creaking.