Cutting Paper Leaves

Carefully, digital gamelan
Playing in the background. Green sweater
And combat boots on the laptop screen.

Nope. Now it’s a deep-field cosmic view.
Look at those smears of amplified light
Calculated to have been headed

This way since before there was a sun.
What fresh perspective does this give you?
None. You’re a human, a few decades

Gone. Not even the combat boots mean
Anything without a proper noun.
You know it’s all vaster than your life,

Your awareness of any of it,
Your memories of what that vast world
Did to your parents and they to you.

If you turned away from everything
Slightly interpretable by you,
A music-free, screen-free, print-free room

Alone, what then would become of you?
Simply existing’s a discipline
Used as a cruel and unusual

Punishment in solitary cells.
The local mountain lion lolling
In the cliffs among the bighorn sheep

Is not happier, gets cold, hungry,
Moves its bowels, prowls for more food, dies.
Does it suffer from a need to know?

No. Now the gamelan’s given way
To guitar and violin. You can
Change your tune but not the listening.