The Numbers Game
Ten trillion galaxies up there, down there, around here
Each with one hundred billion stars, give or take
Can you wrap your head around an octillion?
All I need is one civilization that gets it right
Just one in an octillion, plus a spaceship, that's it
Not for me, the expansive vistas afforded those who sit
Atop a nation-sized pile of human wreckage
Three hundred million strong and breeding
Sipping Maggies and smoking Castros
Poisons to poison the perception of poisoning
The dog is so very done with the pony
My millionth micro-apotheosis
will not make me any more divine
than I already am, just more enshrined
The wooden boy will always be wooden
No, your institutionalized parasitism is for someone
Who wouldn’t slowly suffocate
On the ashes of that which cannot nourish
My roots require a different soil
So many starving at the Kool Aid and Twinkie buffet
The ten thousand ways I’ve died to be reborn
Ten-thousand and one mini-reincarnations
Not one courtesy of this benighted domain
Praise be to all that is not this invert realm
The sublime countercurrent opposing all that is worldly
Humility is unshrining of the self-statue
Shovel away the foul cement before it hardens
No I absolutely cannot play the game
Of hubris, your oh so tasty damnation
if I stand still the poisons will stop draining
And then what of my heart?
If you think all this blabbering is pointless
You shoulda heard what I was saying
Seven or eight addictions ago
Because that’s another fetid pile of wreckage
It’s progress, not perfection
You can just beam me up anyway
6/11/16
© Thomas W. Quigley
Copyright © Tom Quigley | Year Posted 2016
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