what you got in poetry

We get to live, what, ninety years
if we’re lucky?
We all just got here.
We’re all just babies.
The only reason we’re not gathering berries and living in trees
is the generational transfer of memory.
Quit acting like we know things or deserve cruelties.
Quit acting like anyone has any more idea than anyone
just because they have money or power
or they’re really good looking or claim to speak for a god.
We’re all just winging this, kids.
On the scope of the universe,
your ninety-five year old gramma
she’s been alive for the exact length
of the fart from a mayfly.
We’re just babies!
We’re born babies and if we’re a bit lucky
we get to die as big wrinkly babies at best.
Nobody here knows much of anything
and the few of us who know a little about one or two things
like fixing a car or 18th century French literature
that doesn’t mean we know much about anything else.
We are all just making it up as we go along and
anything more complicated than knowing how to sing or make love
we only know second-hand
because someone taught that to someone
who taught that to someone who taught that to someone
who wrote it down then someone else taught that to us.
Beyond that, this precious soap-bubble film of being alive
it is all improvisation.
There are no people more worthy of comfort or health or peace
than anyone else, no matter what stories they make up to say different.
We’re all just babies playing with colourful blocks
someone else left behind, that’s all.
Ninety years or so at best, we just got here.
Share what you have to share.
Play as much as you can possibly play.
Love whenever the whirlwind allows you.
We’re all in this together, just be humane.
We’re all in this together for a little while.