Man

Can’t push it, though you want to.
Some part of you refuses to undo
its massed resistance to what it
completely understands is life’s
sole efficacious mode, of letting go –

although it deeply knows it cannot
set its urgent exigencies over
the essential one of simply being.
Whatever must propel spermatozoa
through their hell of uphill battle

to the prize: whatever cloud dispels
the certainty that all but one of them
will die: and that survivor will become
some other creature so entirely
it might as well not have been what

it started out to be – whatever clings
to the extremity of thinking its own
substance is as much as can be
counted on – whatever’s mounting
that receptive orifice expecting

a transcendent lift but doomed
to sift into its opposite: whatever
doesn’t want to know that its trajectory
will end in entropy – whatever that all
cannot do, but thinks it can: is man.


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