The world was wrought of a mixture of dirt, water, fire,
and air, with the scream “Don't Touch Me!” embedded in that mire, 
rupturing first a plant, eventually a face, 
so that you'd never presume the world was a naked place.
Then their rose vast rooms, furniture, ardent loves, 
the past’s appetite for the future, the tenors for busted lungs.
Letters broke into motion, making the eyeball roll, 
and emptiness grew fearful for its very soul.
Birds with the first to detect this, although a star, 
too, signals the fate of a stone that’s slung astray.
Any sound, be it music, a whisper, the howling wind, 
is the fruit of anything’s friction against its kind.
In shrieking beaks, in cumulus, in blazing pulsars none see, 
the ear makes out a nagging “No vacancy,” 
either an echo of the carpenter’s boy or else 
addressless stone-cold suns sputtering SOS.
And heeding the shrill “Amscray! Beat it! Vanish! Grab
your junk and get lost!” space itself, alias the backdrop 
of life, rendered blind by a surfeit of plots,
heads toward pure time, where no one applauds.
Don't be afraid, though: I've been there. There in its bowels looms 
a huge, wrinkle-spinning wheel, its roots 
plugged into a raw material who supply
we, the deposits, eagerly multiply.