Anxiety waits
for a table
under a cave painting.
Water stirred
with a spear.
Keeping it together
is a form of digestion
and digestion
is a form of commitment
to the dignity
of letting it go.
One part of you,
as an act of survival,
starts eating another part.
This is a membranous
decision
in which the crowd,
having mistaken
its periphery, resembles
its prey.
It was unbearable
to see the possum
lying there.
You asked me
to drive over its head
with the car. Hope
is such a strange
evolutionary adaptation.
What selective pressures
must have been
its shepherd,
what drinking glass
with an envelope
placed over the top
carrying a spider outside?
Against the occupations
and desertions,
against the bodies
tied to trees
and the flags partitioning
the wind above them,
against the accumulated
wealth
that acquires a house
with an aquarium
big enough to require
its own diver,
against the majuscule
Idea of refined sugars
and depictions of capital
concentrating
on its breathing,
there is this hopeful
monster.
You breastfeed
the survivor
with coded plans
for escape.
The signal slips
through undetected
like the possum
and its adaptive
capacity
to convincingly die.
