The beach

Happiness in my hand,
That elusive substance
Runs swift like sand
Gently blowing out
To sea. Under my feet
- I try to reach,
But the waves deplete
My strength and I am
Sunk in the substance:
Temporaryism, old friend.
Mutability, munificent
In its caress, its press
Against my skin,
Its insistence on
Sinking in
And drowning out
The hollows of sound.
But I can rise,
With strength abound,
Found on some coast
With happiness stuck
Between my toes
And the water drying
While I roast.

I

In life I had feared what it meant, when that last electric pulse strained out, to cease to be and to never be again. Not like being unconscious, or asleep, in that faint dimness of cognition... but utterly gone, absent, and unable to comprehend or be an "I" ever again. But here I am, still an I. I had not feared that in death I would be an I: that is far worse than becoming mud, than being absorbed, than surrendering to the womb of the Earth. Scattered Is, all looking up and into themselves and into everything. I am woodwo, I am seeing, I am blind; there is no scent, no taste. My blood: a river runs through it, and it runs through the river, and the blood of other boys' bodies scattered. Their own isolated Is. We have no mouths anymore. A branch took my arm, on its way down. Despite fear, I did it. Fear was less than the other thing. Now I've got the other thing in spades: a crippling sense of self, the self in chunks, all a self all the same.