ALL

a ball, balloon of emptiness

inside another emptiness

                                         inside your thoughts on the empty inevitability

of your thoughts. It's effervescent, fizz

around a drain that becomes nothing

sooner or later.

                            Are you afraid of death?

Are you so uncomfortable at funerals

you fake lupus to avoid them?

It's not your parents, or their bodies there,

your lack of progeny that suggests the end, eventual

of all your useful thought—

and it's not the shell they've

and you've

built around yourself

to keep the world outside—