The Pallbearers’ Song

Our thoughts revolve around three states
Of being: is, isn’t but seems

As if it is, and just isn’t.
Why should it seem a mystery,

Either that anything should be
At all, or that it all might be

Illusion or simulation?
Our thoughts admit nothing much else,

And if they did, we wouldn’t be.
Now, hunger—that’s a mystery.

Life, life’s desires, are mysteries.
Even our ideas can contain

An awareness of other states
Of being and being changing—

If anything, we’re more challenged
To seek life than to avoid it.

We can conceive of what it is
To exist and yet to not live.

Oh, but, oh dear god, we’re hungry,
And everything alive desires,

And from desire, competition,
Cooperation, destruction.

We fall back on conspiracies,
As if our world needed designs

To get up to anything weird.
Conspiracies and mysteries

And long, magical narratives—
As if anything needed these

To live the way life lives and dies,
Hungry, grasping, motivated.

We are our own conspiracies.
It’s not what we want or they want—

It’s not what anything wanted.
What thing wants to be left wanting?

Given life wants to keep living,
The things all lives want all make sense.

The rest is just overcrowding,
Limitations, complications.

There’s no wickeder way to live
Than living and wanting to live.

There’s no other monster but life,
No other order of beings.

But every time a casket drops
From our shoulders back to the dirt,

We must sing this hymn of wonder
That dirt ever wanted other

Than to go on without wanting,
Without wondering, without hurt.