MINE

all of it is

and it is a,                                                                                                                      

going down forever,

or what might as well be forever*

to friends like mine,

into earth, which is off-limits to us

as it was not to our fathers

who crawled their lives into holes like this

and worked in the gassy spark-lit dark

until their lungs seized up and they were pastured,

hacking for the worst part of a decade

on the front porch, forced to survey

the plumes of smoke from the refinery,

a system that we hacked into in the night a decade later

with baseball bats, golf clubs, smoke bombs, flares.

What did we find there?

What did we leave?

Did we ever leave?

__

* "might as well" is not good enough:

a thing is or is not forever,

not just the apparation of it, light receding