In December

I met him just two months before

he died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head

everything exists in pain and imagination

and I am struck by the sharp deficit of human compassion

we have our objects and we have our nothingness

in our searching we cobble together false creation

two days prior to his death in the potato field

his hands already digging into the earth

gathering a few or a many, scattering a few or a many

acting out with more or less exactitude than a suicide

no one knows what was said or might have been said

in the face of world-annihilation

creation is a forgery

it fails to sustain, and it will fail to sustain

SM