handfuls of air

All must be accepted, this I know;

the only other path is despair.

The holiness of the neglected,

of all human filth left on the margins,

must be accepted.

The trailer in the dark ocean of stars,

lit by an orange halogen lamp

and the pulsing blue heartbeat of a TV within.

I catch a glimpse on the road and it's gone.

Who are these people who live so unmoored?

I speak of the loneliness felt in your entrails.

Rotting pallets next to a dumpster behind a mall

built a few decades ago in such hope,

now barren amidst acres of asphalt parking lots

warmed under the glow of the lamps:

the silent periphery guardians.

Imagine yourself transported

to a pitch black forest at an unknown vector,

a buzzing fluorescent parking garage stairwell,

a dripping cave on an unknown planet,

a dusty basement in some grandmother's house,

piles of hoarded memories untouched for years

and an unheard smoke alarm crying out.

For how long? Let it wash over you.

Do these places long for people or loathe them,

or do they hide from us?

All I know is you must love them all or nothing:

all the books never read except by their authors,

every machine-written article, every line of code,

every archived file on every dead hard drive.

No crevice may be rejected if

one is to accept any of it.

Every forgotten film, every advertisement,

all deserve acknowledgement

because they can be known.

Every yellowed memory in every brain waiting

to flare for the last time then die

must be accepted without hesitation.

Every outdated textbook, instruction manual,

ugly piece of clothing ever produced,

every plastic effluvium vomited by industry,

I must take it into myself and consume it,

lift the cup of life to my lips

and guzzle it down without fear.

Pour it into me, let it coat my insides,

let it dissolve the guarded me,

the sore, small, limited, choosy me.

Every Platonian ideal of every object,

every falsified theory,

every second of cynical content ever produced,

I will engorge myself with it,

relieve the overburdened world of it.

Let it wash through me; I'll rinse it with words.

Every piece of plastic at the bottom of the ocean,

every hidden fossil and cryptic glyph,

every word on the tips of the tongues,

let it wash through me unjudged.

Every student film, opinion piece

scrap of litter in the tall grass,

forgotten dream and celebrity,

wash through these words.

Every horror unspeakable or unspoken.

Reality decided; it knows what I need.

It bleeds, and I swallow.

Nothing overlooked, nothing unloved,

no orphans in my universe, no unspoken bastards.

All friendless people and forgotten names,

all motherless sons and fatherless daughters,

all words ever written or spoken or sung,

all trivial things I bring

into myself and make them sacred.