poem

 Holocene

Relax!

Touch some grass, they say.

So I lay down on my back

And watched a series of clouds

Slide past on an ocean of blue mantle

Like tectonic plates sliding to dooms

At the bottom of a distant trench.

Then I saw a white jet pass through 

The solid core of the earth

And suddenly it was clear—

Everything here comes from the sun.

When I went back to work

It was no longer the holocene,

Not a trace of a hospital seen.

Strange plants and a burning in my chest

Confirmed my worst suspicions—

In the grand scheme of it all

Each life, at most,

Is a minor orogeny erased 

Over the course of a single,

Uneventful,

Late summer afternoon.

9/17/26