A Circumstance Like That

What doesn't run around and meet itself?
What isn't solipsistic? What don't you
absolutely make, create? What is there
to placate but your own anxiety-refining
factories of shadows and ballistics –
strategies, defensive prayers, phylacteries
that counter your interior’s addictions to its
fears? What squares eternity with years?

What time is it to everyone who isn't you?
(Is there anyone who isn't you?) Who but
who-is-reading-this decides what's true?
That's what’s rich – the hitch, the bitch.
Can't ignore the itch that something else,
or more, is scratching at the door: some alien
embodiment dispatching some essential
fact that you don't know, and should: that

life exists beyond your bad or good or “could.”
(Doesn't help to knock on wood.) Multiversity
not unity may be the secret final curse
(although that there is more to everything
than you seems so perverse!) which licks
the outside of this verse like some ignoble
cat. And there's no way to make provision,
is there, for a circumstance like that.


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