I was just thinking in the shower
about how everything is made out of nonliving things.

quarks, atoms…
there’s another big/small one (inside the atom, beside the quark)
I can’t think of
and probably others,
but I didn’t take a science this year,
so I can’t speak in certainties,
like scientists.

(they were once were sure that the world wasn’t round,
but they seem pretty certain now.
I don’t know…
aren’t we ignorant to still assume anything in endless space has f****** shape?

and somewhere there’s a paper being written
that says the ground you’re standing on
ain’t nothing but lies.
so is substance.

how should I know
why you’re not sinking, though.
the human mind isn’t right,
it don’t quantify existence.
only papers and procedure do that,
cause we live in a sterile society
in a universe populated by billion ton
fiery balls
and emptiness
and trees
and emptiness
and me.

with all the contrasting certainties available
to be learned and arrogantly sputtered
after just a few short computer clicks,
I guess I’ve learned it’s best
to just not give a s***.

maybe I’m just a dream awake
in the navel of a sleeping man,
or something else insane.
I wouldn’t be half-surprised,
half the time.

Anyway,
in the shower (I suppose…
if showers be knowable)
my thoughts turned to atoms
that I defined this:
•
what we’re made of (and, also, s*** and such, and everything that isn’t nothing
(assuming such nothings exist and we ourselves, and also all the stuff, aren’t nothing))
•
aren’t living, aren’t dead, and were never neither
•
where we come from; an impersonal and hungry a father as Adam, though freer of guilt.

to a man as melancholy as me,
this might normally seem poetically horrifying,
or just horrifying,
but definitely perfect melancholia.
today it appeared in my mind coldly, rationally.

without heart or humanity
my thoughts carried me,
fortunately.
for as the scientific method says,
all inquiries,
especially those regarding humanity,
must be approached with the calculated precision of a machine
(possibly already deciding our fates with insinuations
that humanity is an illusion.
but, whatever. I was thinking,
and my thoughts were winding and pseudo-scientific,
so mostly nonsense)

anyway,
atoms aren’t alive but we’re made of them.
so are we alive?
or even we?
what constitutes alive?, I asked,
thumb on chin (jus kiddin).

but seriously, does movement constitute life?
‘cause comets move,
bright flashes of pretty light and burned rock
zooming in flights determined by gravity or something similar,
with slight, random deviations,
until they splinter and collapse
or crash into a planet
and kill some animals,
that may or may not be alive.

is it thinking,
that makes us truly alive?
I just read certain plants think, in a way,
and some humans don’t, in a way,
and electrons might actively choose to spin to certain places.
so, who’s more alive,
the carrot, the e, or the me?

so, I repeated to no one (or maybe myself,
it all depends on the Truth,
which is real and truthful without our regards,
perhaps)
what’s alive?
maybe its nothing,
a lie we devised.
maybe it’s in our nature,
determined, that we devise this particular lie.

like the lizard
whose skin turns different shades on different days,
in an attempt to survive the hawk
with camouflage (even though he never had a say)
or like a cloud that makes rain and forms curious shapes,
things just do what they do
and other things are no different than us.
just different in the way they
do the things that they do.


and we happen to be the only ones
who devised the idea of “alive.”
We do what we do,
which is what other forces make us do.
maybe there’s no such thing as alive,
only existing and jobs,
if that.

I wonder if we proved ourselves out of existence
when we split the atom
and only found the same lifeless stuff inside.
No miraculous heartbeat keeping humanity alive.
then we built a bomb,
and said, don’t worry,
death is only a rearrangement of molecules.
but so is birth.
so my only question,
to those in the know (as they say, though we’re all the same)
is then what’s the point?

I guess you could say,
be happy,
we’re all breathin’
and made out of the same junk
that forms Everest,
which reaches towards a heaven made of the same material as me.
I say,
we’re also made of the same basic material
as s***
and a homogeneous universe
is a valueless one,
just a pavement road of purposeless particles.

I just gotta hope I won't feel the same way tomorrow
and I’ll survive and someday really live,
or whatever this is.