I Can't Decide What to Feel About This Life

out of the womb;

still slick with afterbirth, 

already screaming.

It’s a miserable claim to sainthood:

third place behind a stray dog lost

in orbit and Cassini’s sacrificial

spiral towards Saturn.

What makes this body Mine, what 

makes it more than another pound 

of flesh inflicted onto the world? 

How long until it burns 

to its own ecstatic end?

into the next morning;

the sun’s yolk is close enough to 

pluck between my teeth, to

tuck in the hollow of my ribs.

Hope is buried inside my marrow. If

the best I can do in this

state of perpetual emergency

is remind my cat to drink his water, 

and keep my hands tender 

on the cracking shells of

fellow celestial bodies, then

survival won’t feel so wretched.

I would return to primordial egg, or

park myself at the end of existence

and throw away the key.

I will cook dinner for the nth time. 

If a watched pot never boils, maybe

a watched world never ends.