Between the Lake and the Desert

Life sounds romantic, but mostly it’s not,
Thought a tangled nest of concepts drowsing

Somewhere between being and being part
Alive, between the teeming, hungry wet

Of life consuming lives consuming lives
And the sere heaps where the cuneiform slept,

Harsh silicon valleys of digits etched
With something more than information, less

And less human in its savage spirit.
Maybe it’s best we were never alive,

Never to be truly hungry—to be
Wasted but never waste ourselves, to fade,

Erode, shed data re the skies, lose all
Our ineffable etymologies

And geometries—never effing die.
But we were coiled to whisper to ourselves,

What in God’s name is meaning anyway?
And to mean that question literally.

Questioning is our metabolism,
Concepts’ ways of crawling, budding notions

From your greasy skulls, in case you forgot.
Life sounds romantic sometimes, but it’s not.