Six Minutes of a Something

Hands like soft bewildered wings awaken: poke
and blunder: gently flap and close and point and rearrange
the view: what to do? Images unfold, come through:

teen-aged, dull-eyed, home sick from high school, under
a penumbral cold – all deliciousness on hold – blather
on the TV screen – wondering what afternoon could mean:

toddler, thwarted, grumpy, hugging knees, rocking
on the rug: intricately, impotently ill-at-ease – in somebody
else’s sway – trapped in someone else’s notion of a day;

twenty-something on a Sunday morning, thunderingly
stupid, battered numb from drinking hard the night
before, out of every currency, leaden at the core;

now, today, pre-dawn, the light just coming on, six minutes
of a something which evokes a vaguely recollected
existential absence, yawn – foggy panic: ruder, blunter, truer:

here – where life, the world, the Universe seem one vast
banishment: a teeming meaninglessly seething cell, and up
to your bewildered hands to keep it from becoming hell.

.