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