Mend your blood

Tell it stories about its ancestors, red their blood.

The man’s meaty white arm and a 90

pound weight suspended lightly off

nothing, off a body’s useless effort and

relentless machine lust. First there was space.

Inside space there was light, very faint at first, then brighter.

From within the light burst matter, exploding through every dimension to new ones and back

through to old, older than the concept of time.

This starstuff became roughly circular, planetary.

One of these, a comfortable distance from the light, played host for millennia

to varying degrees of bacteria which eventually

joined forces in molecular shape to become symbiotic forms.

There evolved a kind of relating between matter and matter that was, on the whole, mutual.

Pause to pet the cat.

I believe

machines won’t kill us faster than the plastics will.

Intimacy with nothing

so much as cellular suffering

the silicone intrusion

chemicals we breed and grow around

tell us where to shit and who to love

tell us what we don’t decide

ourselves. Nothing can’t be fixed.

Nothing can be fixed we didn’t break.

“I don’t want to live in a world without killer whales”

my friend texts me, in quotation marks. I don’t

know that I want to live at all but here I am, loving it.

Silence now and the murmur of distant voices

drills drilling, hammers hammering

Something encounters wood.

Squeaks itself free.