Radiant Beasts

This is almost certainly not the end
that Mr. Bouda imagined,
nor is it the one
that any of us here,
envisioned for ourselves,
either.

Third floor acute care cardiology.
View of a funeral home, abandoned construction and parking lot–
grey cement road, grey cement sky, grey cement world.
We are standing there,
Mr. Bouda and I,
staring out the window in our hospital gowns,
each one imagining
some internal horizon,
some place living in the past or future,
that we might occupy like the heroes who beat
in our chests.

Mr. Bouda, as if plucked from a distant-era cartoon,
speaks in a huge, European accent.
.
He’s flirty with the nurses,
who giggle rather than sneer,
but he cries each night and
twists in his sleep,
waking once from dream,
shouting, “You have the gun,
use it, use it, use it now, dammit!!”

And ever since I have wondered about that dream,
the entity that needed to be eliminated,
a vision of the young Mr. Bouda action-figuring through his days,
his heart so big it devoured mountains and rivers
and entire skies.

But now we feel so old, so ancient,
our hearts congested and heavy
as we disintegrate
into this world swirling before us,
our bodies falling away
from our lives.

And the water inside of us,
the fluid our mortal flesh can no longer abide,
is billions of year old.

Beyond time.
Immortal.

And now we wait before the window for a blast of light
to appear,
to erase the diminishing present,
and transform us,
once again,
into the Gods who have always lived within.