when there’s nothing left
when you’re an astronaut blasted out of your body
and you drift back to earth as scraps of twisted metal and shreds of failed rubber rings
and you don a pith helmet and matching khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt and big lace-up explorer boots
and you excavate
and you trace out the residue of a settlement and piece together skeletons and garments from a few shards of bone and a bit of miraculously preserved weave and the drawings on the shattered jars and the splotched, hole-filled, and strange-tongued texts.

That’s when you realize
there never had been anything
you’d always been a part-time astronaut
blasting out of your pretend life
and you’d always worked full-time for the university, patching together a plausible account of some long-dead reality.

There’s two and a half months of freedom, two and a half months of not-Russia, two and a half months when the post-democracy GOP definitely is not in charge of the executive branch, when the rot definitely has not yet undone all the fun of a free people freely speaking and freely choosing.

That’s when you realize
you never had been anyone
you’d always been a make-shift tent
blown across the yard by some big fat gusts
you always dent the back of your neighbor’s tin-and-paper home
he always makes a big stink and gets thousands of dollars from your homeowner’s insurance,
which he always pockets, leaving his beautiful box a little dinged and dented in one spot where no one would anyway notice.
And he, likewise, was never anything but a seagull’s shriek mixed with the rushing air that holds a seagull up over the gray lake where it washes up onto the pebbly beach that smells like rotten fish and where you can find lots of glass worn down by the tumble by years of the tumble and turn over and drag along and push forward and rub rub rub.

Can we please
go now
Can we please
go home now
You didn’t know
when you where a little boy
What the cut was
or what it
would do
You couldn’t tell
when you played on shag rugs with plastic toys
Where the story lay
or how it would grow
Now
you
know
a little
about what
you
never
knew
Can we please go now?