I only have a second to live.
Then the next second
kicks in. These packets

sparkle when I look at them
while holding a lit sparkler,
which I threw as a child, a few feet

away from where I stood
wanting a better arm. I have been
overly enthused for some time

about time, which is not
modular in the way it has been
in this poem, but nothing

is the way it has been
in this poem, not even this poem.
That’s one of the charms

of life, that when it turns
its head to cough, like the doctor
asks, a bird goes by outside

and life goes with it,
then pulls up its pants
and is fine, near as anyone

can tell, though it is obviously
dying, given that things
begin and end, between which

the middle prevails, otherwise
we’d call it something else,
given our interest in the truth.

If you’re inside me at the hockey game,
you’re inside the arena
when the winning goal’s scored and octopi

thrown onto the ice. A Detroit thing,
as in Cambodia, they don’t play hockey
or call it Cambodian food, it’s just food,

but if you’re inside me and I go
to Angkor Wat, you see how tourism
destroys the past. This love of ours

has done little for you thus far
in this poem. If you’re inside me
when I write a letter urging my senator

to vote against the death penalty,
you’re ineffectual in your outrage too.
But it feels good, doesn’t it,

when I can’t decide if I need
a four or five inch bolt, to be the voice
inside me saying, does it matter,

as I am the voice inside you saying,
I am the voice inside you, the voice
beside your voice inside you, the voice

holding the hand of that voice,
which is anatomically impossible
though romantically essential. If you

are inside me I am lucky: I am lucky:
therefore you are inside me: that’s called
a proof. I’m serious: I don’t know

what good the death penalty does.
“Cruel and inhuman” sounds like a law firm.
You sound like everything to me.