The symptom, I would have said to Walter,
dead in California,
is restlessness, a mindsore.
A vast crowd came between us.
What news, I would have asked him, of civilized man?

Someone has been sighing in the silence.
I will create a script for it.
A soaring above the mores.

My neurons gossip of utter reality.
Of eerie continuities.
Deluding my biorhythms.

At a certain depth, they say,
a diver begins to hallucinate.

Eras may be breaking out.

I might be writing a remorseful letter to posterity.
Or interviewing the gargoyles, the street children,
the ballerinas who portray the necessary evils.
Or walking in the woods in October
with an ear for its mantra
and a stick for threatening chipmunks.
Or taking a highway to the sea.

I have skeptical, have disjunctive eyes
that see several auras at once.
I might keep a journal for each.
And pursue them back to my tabula rasa.

The measure of a man, said Marcus Aurelius,
is the worth of things he cares about.


Earth has a plausibility,
but it is not ours.
The thirteen ways of consenting to be a man
are buried in the crevices of the gray matter.