what for?

FOR NOW
I lay in post-orgasmic leisure
smoking my after-cigarette and basking in the spring breeze.
I think back to how sad and small past realities have been.
I see it reflected in you, still now.
You are a monolith in my rear view window.

FOR THEN
There were knicknacks on my dashboard covered in dust
their fragility and instability made me nervous--
these are feelings I know well.
In a past life, they distracted me from the road,
and I veered toward my death.
But no, not this time.
Back on the horse, I keep my focus. I am driven,
and sometimes driving,
though I have no poetic license to speak of.

FOR PEACE
Some things are soft because they're ripe,
some things are soft because they're rotten.
It takes so many sense to know the difference,
the sweet smell of decay consumed in natural sugar.
Everything is as it should be.

FOR DETAIL
Waiting in line, you think of my small talk.
You said it sounded so genuine against the white noise whine of the daily grind.
Sometimes I think it must stick with you,
sometimes I think about how you will always agonize
over hopelessly little things.


FOR THE RECORD
When we stood at the mouth of a hole so deep,
I saw challenge and you saw defeat.
I left you there, obstinately,
preferring conceit to a crushing reality
and guarding a place to make a stand
over conceding my fate to foreign boundaries.
But those walls were built on inside-thoughts,
the political an extension of the personality.
Oops, ouch, it seems I burned myself.
Prepare for landing gravity.

FOR LATER
We traveled across a million miles
and through a million years
just so our atoms could collaborate to
make the moments we see here.
It's not so much the how or why
that concerns me with these terms,
but the sigh of the now that powers us
through the reality that we're not unique.
And we ask why we might be here,
without knowing that it's to have that very thought,
and create a world to answer it in,
and reflect and act it out again.
And if you need to assert that that's not enough,
the joke is that you have to create
a thing, a person, an idea, a being
for humanity to answer to.