as yet unnamed
Stretched out into nothingness
I can count all my bones
And in between them
Rotating plastic German hominids
And faded Trapper Keepers with torn covers
Once limpid, now brittle
Spinning there
Here's a picture of C and me, C and me
Me with my mouth cut out
Me with a man's bluish head on green field
His askew glance evading me over the years
Stretched into a membrane of moments
With this monotonous buzzing chorus of one,
This droning almost celebration,
My flesh stings while I assess the wreckage
Of ten thousand motivational tapes
Of failed accountability partnerships
Of everyone's picket fences and private pools
Of well-planned retirement packages
The droning...
I didn't kill it.
I quit listening.
So, here I am
Stretched into nothingness
Counting all my parts
Scanning the menagerie
The Portuguese conjugation guides
A compendium of symbolic emblems of the Pennsylvania Dutch
Documentary evidence on the historic appearance of the archangel Gabriel
To a Greek choirmaster
My stomach feels warm against my hand
My ribs splay out
Aching into evolutionary trees
My things circulated throughout all my times
I am that which was always the locus of all those things to each other
I was existing as a permeable membrane or as particles
I had identity but not how I had conceived it
My chest was granite and heat
My hand was a skeletal toy
Wrapped in bacon grease
The past fin of some wet dog
Or future wing of some ancient lizard
Grasping sausages packed into a skin
Stretched out with one more turn of the crank
I looked down and saw me stretched into cosmic deerskin
Upon which the universe beat
I could not control it's song
All I could do was look at this holy thing
That was my own nothingness
Acted on by other wills
And in that pre-archaelogical evidence
Before shovels and brushes and charts
In that field of silent airport gates and forgotten Rubbermaid dish drainers
Of ceramic tiki gods and mended fractured tibias
Of shaped Bahamian coins and bright orange Sanka lids
I began to see
We were all nothing
But drums
Bill Rogers
August 30th, 2007