Desperately clinging to existence
You permit your brain to be scanned, mapped,
And transferred to a computer
Where your consciousness resides
Digitalized among the pulsating lights
And tangled wires
Jolts of memory
Flashes of your life
Appear on a screen
Mother's face
The sun, the sea, the stars,
Fireworks in the park
Your first lover's smile
All coolly surveyed in the circuitry
Detached memories of joy, frustration, sorrow
Days experienced in human flesh
Now mediated through a machine
While busy technicians walk by
In the noisy laboratory

Show the way to the Holy City
Show the way that you shall go
Up to the mountain of the Holy City
Up to the temple of the Lord
Look out over rooftops, over fields of plenty
Look out under a vaulted sky of blue
Give thanks that the Lord has bid you hither
Give praise that the day of peace has come

As you look out the train window
And watch the old buildings go by
You imagine that one day you will wake up
On the wrong side of town
In the wrong bed
With the wrong partner
And that this is all
Just a matter of time

Sky Burial

On the charnel grounds
There are no illusions
The body is broken apart
And offered on a slab
For vultures--
But in that rocky, jagged world
There is a recompense
For those whose epitaph might read
“Never really lived, but died anyway”
That, at the very least, one can serve
A larger purpose and become
A source of nourishment

A parallel universe
Beside you
Shielded from view
As if by smoked glass
Grandfather reading
Grandmother in the kitchen
Then, now, after
Movements across time
As time and space bend

The walls of the hotel
Are so thin
You can hear the scream
As if in your room
You start up from sleep
And see the moonlit clouds
Through the window
You feel your breath go faster
In your constricted chest
While voices whisper near your door--
That scream, was it yours?

Cold Storage

A human head
Left in a tube
Looking with frozen eyes
Blindly at countless dawns
Trapped in a world of ice
Its former owner
Having prayed
With the fervor of the holy
For resurrection

The sudden shower
At the canal
The waves rocking the boats
The stone walls of the castle
Turning dark gray from the wet
While lightning savages the sky
And makes the air electric
This moment in the soaking rain,
Remembered in a year? a decade?
Kept in a cosmic record for the afterlife
Or swirled down the rain gutter
Into oblivion?
It is now, this feeling,
This rain

Like a seed
In the earth
At the mercy
Of Winter and time
Under the glare of the sun
And the gaze of the moon
Through generations of green
And yellowing leaves
Amidst the passing voices
Of children and old men
It waits enclosed
Until that Spring
When slowly it breaks through
And flowers