Please stop circulating the untrue rumor
that I have been telling people I hope there is
no Heaven, that one world
is enough. Bandages stocked
in the padlocked aisle, claim denial, bird 
spikes, rent hikes, people sleeping in arrays
of rags and being categorized as rags—why 
wouldn’t I want more of what God made?

You said NATURE IS INDIFFERENT
TO SUFFERING. I said whoa you and nature 
have so much in common—you should get 
together sometime. Listen, if it looks like 
I’m dying, I’m not—I’m just burning
up in Earth’s atmosphere like comet debris 
on impact, piercing the field
and then flashing away. It should be any day.

Five hours and forty-three minutes to get to the redwood,
at which point a voice announced from the sky
ONE OF YOU DOWN THERE IS NINE HUNDRED YEARS OLD—

it didn’t specify which of us, but I’m pretty sure
it meant me—

I’m just so degraded. I couldn’t have gotten this degraded
in a few decades’ time.

When I let out my dog in the sage scrub,
to deter the coyotes I’m yelling A PERSON’S HERE, TOO—
but in truth I don’t know if I am

a person, or if I’m just an anthropomorphic iteration
of the knowledge that the idiom CUT TO THE CHASE 
originated in film editing; it’s just what you do

when your action movie borders on the overlong—

I’ve bordered on the overlong. I’ve sustained
an unregenerate burn. I’ve died and, out of boredom, 
returned. I’ve thrown a stone

down the well of myself, listening for the smack
against the clay bottom. I never heard it. I went on forever—