at first there was nothing

The planet would not recognize a pure hearted man. The universe is always up to something. You matter, in the sense that every ant and bee matter. In the way that every bacterium and virus matters, as part of the squirming, seething, motion of the whole. You look to nature, you find no kings. You look to nature, you see the way creation plays out without all the extras. The hats and gloves and guns that we claim makes us special, even as our hierarchy and specialization makes us less, on an organism to organism level. The cosmos burns at ten thousand hells a second. Our species is due a brushback, and we have achieved the distinction of having one hell of a reckoning in the chamber, our collective itchy trigger finger firing at everything at once.

I’m out here smoking all my consequences. I’m out here watching the workings of the world without. The crows fly west, the geese fly east, none of them checking out my theories as to all the where and whys. A bumblebee briefly checking out the sorry agapanthus before speeding off to better blooms doesn’t bother with an explanation. I sit with all the in the way words, the aphorisms and platitudes that keep spilling from our yaps. I sit amid the aggregate art and music inside the lines of this negligible architecture, an iteration of the species that somehow fails both the biological and the cultural continuity. Not so much an aberration, but the outcome of the numbers at play.

The swallows do their Shakespeare bit, swooping and startling their way through the sky. The measure of the probable in the possible, the song written before there were songs. We spin upon the cooling sphere as we keep adding carbon into the gathered atmosphere, listening to the idiot, useless thieves that we seem to think deserve a say about our common resources. Word stupid and acclimated to our own hollow agency, we mistake all sorts of made up things for reality, reality disinterested in our opinions. So we die and starve and are beaten because of some spells cast by priests and wizards, claiming freedom with every stolen opportunity, claiming cleverness and courage for the cowards who keep us around to beat upon and steal from while we pull their plows. Hubris in our own individuality, pretending that we make the world out of the ether. Gulled by those with only the short game in mind, we play out our betrayal. The sun sets and the stars we look to couldn’t tell the difference, our distance the only thing we know.