1
Hallucinated into existence? That is my wonder. Let’s toast three fingers deep to imagined reality, to the counterfeit faux as genuine. Let’s just drink backwards and spit in our glass. Does this make any sense to you, or am I reading too much quantum theory on eternity, part and parcel to particles governing the whole shebang? What polices you? The rules of physics are constant, so they must be ruled from devolving into cosmic anarchy. Is that you, warden of strings? My physics prof went mad at the sheer size of knowledge, and I don’t blame you. You never said we needed to understand in entirety. That’s why we got faith, right? Faith seeking reason is theology and there is no crying in theology. It is jailhouse rockabilly blaring from a dented jalopy driving down a dark road into a ghost town we were never warned about. We should have been warned about that town. We need your policing.
2
A hawk with cataracts, we are famished for a taste of you. We’re perched on our thrones of rotting limbs looking around and around like deranged owls none-the-wiser for looking. Delicious the hunt for you once seemed when we needed a telescope to see the end. No more as nevermore is explored now with just naked eyes, squinting our destiny: a lemming saying follow me, or a snake eating its own tail in the Garden at Gethsemane (or is that Eden, Godhead of Gardens?). When we can see the end, we want to stop looking into our minds. What does oblivion look like anyway: wormholes in a casket maybe? What does it sound like? Just gibberish groaned in a foxhole? No one can explain what nonexistence feels like except the giver of existence and I don’t want to be touched.
3
Are you renewable, or can we waste you away? You’re supposed to be forever, but they say all good things come to an end. That’s an indictment of you and your heaven. Thinking about forever makes people do mathematics, scares the imagination out of them. No end in sight and we go blind looking for the end. Heaven is forever? Like an eternal orgasm? That would go from ecstasy-to-ouch real quick. Your atheist creation Freud said pleasure is release from pain, a parole, evacuating a three-alarm shit into an awaiting bowler’s hat. Does what I’m saying bother you? I’ll stop. To pleasure you, I’ll release you from the pain, my shit.
4
Going to our knees is sign of respect, or a sign of begging, and sometimes those things are the same thing at once. That is why you gave us two knees, you clever conjurer of balance. A half-hearted genuflection is at least half-a-heart and you don’t deserve the whole thing yet. You can’t possibly love us all. They say there is no limit to love even though desire is endless distance too, so where do we look now? We can trim the rose bushes, we can get knee replacement, but what about our eyes, worn from beholding all those tin cup beggars pleading for penny mercies. You have to respect those bums for living on their knees out in the open. We are all living on our knees, we just don’t know it. And it isn’t out of respect.
5
With your Mobius existence, celebrating birthdays must seem odd to you, even comic, yes? Odd as pocket watches watching time, mile markers marking distance—irrelevant things man-made into consequence. You’re our father so it’s just us whining in the backseat, asking how much longer until we perish, how much further to go to get gotten. Today, I take my birthday to the bar for bourbon, thank the calendar for remembering, thank the bourbon for forgetting. There is little left to be said about a birthday—one step forward, one foot inching toward the dirt. It’s not supernatural. To someone eternal like you, do you even know what a day is? What, I wonder, is supernatural to you? It is natural to forget you until we are inches away.
Alien Buddha Press 