Jacob McArthur Mooney
(after Kay Sage)
You thought that I had asked to die,
but what I asked was to be released
from the future. Its trudge and aphorisms.
You asked: how will we live after civilization?
I admitted: civilization was all that I was here for.
Where else are we? Featureless landscapes
like a storyboard for dreams. The interior life
that we wanted is astride us. Come closer.
Let me inhale what you didn’t need to keep.
Initial sleep, life before life, then an interrupted
sleep called Nights, and then the third:
that one long feeling, like
being cold-launched through time,
a cartoon from a cannon. Wind in my face,
all that spotless gravity,
so handsome and stupid and free.
