Being[1]

We go into night 
spontaneous 
unprepared 
without  
knowing  
the bait[2] 
waits  
and has since  
before our conceptions[3]

our deaths invented 
prior to our selves  
the lash  
of stars  
outpouring cosmic gas  
a plume not unlike  
this red wisp of prairie smoke[4]

but wider than 50,000 suns 
and You[5] are there 
if there 
is the right word  
the right world 
we have 
no way of knowing 

[1] noun and verb: sharing / inhabiting / fighting within the same skin; wound like a skein but of what is a question if not the question. The toddler lifts her arms / wings to the blackbird in the naked hackberry—it’s spring, April, a wind cleansing everything into its new self—and cries—of joy, of intensity, of being.  

[2] beita, that which is bitten, to bite; to split; pasture (“pa–”: to feed): place of  the bitten, the biters. Look I will at his teeth and tell you of the man. 

[3] “con–”: together, with; concipere: to take in and hold; where were we when  without—with out? That “outness.” What wish had we when?—not when, for when wasn’t; “kap–”: to grasp.  

[4] Avens / Rosales / “old man’s whiskers”—if the last then stained by blood.  Daddy hungry for baby again. Cronos eating himself / his selves / his bright replicas so that the compulsion to put inside—to put back that which leaves you—to hold them closer than the body allows, to know them, to be them, to be that which you are not but were, to be that again, to seek the center—the savior—the seven gates blasted open, to make me, we, to make us free.

[5] cf. I & He. You grasped—in conception, of concept, of flesh, of temporality, of pump and jettison, of breath, of egg and placenta, of the channels of blood —held together by You—of You—some vibration, some second person, the one inside, around, above, and, yes, beyond the first, the one that contains the first and third—the reduction and amplification, the intent—intendere, to stretch out, lean toward, strain.