While posing shirtless on my couch, I often receive your question:
What am I doing?
I can only reply that I am on your side.
Striving to explain, I write here the feelings that digress into phrases.
Striving, yet still I imply the meaning that sometimes follows words:
Language is our lens – but here we are studying theory,
And if I had something to say, if my self control blessed me with that,
Then I hope it rhymed with theory, like weary does.
Or if an equal chance granted me relief from the sweat that comes from
Running about with a soccer ball, and I put my shirt on and proclaim that
There is a god!
I would feel the great implication of the end,
I would think of decline and those whose birth is a diving board;
I, sighing, would assure you that I am on your side.

Then I am buried,
My friends peek at my will but find no statement concerning the unfinished hamburger;
How different are our minds from the world around us!
We smile with a slap in our teeth,
Or guess at freezing only to find the world’s truth circled in red pen.
If only my father had sat me down and told me
That the relative, more than the absolute, would make me a man.
And then my mother could have added
That the relative is made of the absolute.
And then my brother pulls me from the room
And I am back where everyone wants me to be.
And then my friends peer at my will but find no clause about the unfinished hamburger.

Death,
Where am I going?
Great implications rise from daydreams of the grave,
Wonder mounts the horse that laps Pacific waves.
So when that man stuffed with wine leans back
and smiles at last when his ramblings end,
will you tell him?
When their story finished, when they doused their sorrowed aimlessness in bottles—
Great Implicator, did you tell them what happened
between the title and the end?
A 17-year-old plays outside and eats,
Already puzzled by mortality
Gentle, distant, savage whittler,
I want to climb before I fall.
Yet, differences and all,
I tell you hopefully that I am on your side.