Part one:
Immanentize the eschaton. The final dispensation. Dreams of Nebuchadnezzar. Feet of iron and clay. Despised carnal kingdom. Disappearing election. The walk of Nebuchadnezzar across temporal plane.
Part two:
The Siamese Pig. Jet is looking at a balled up composite booger, harvest orange and an opaque sort of thick white-green. He is eying it. He wants to know how an eyelash could get trapped in the middle of a booger. We do not have the heart to tell him it is something from a nostril, that there are follicles even in sniffers. And how pretty it looked to him. An eyelash. He doesn't notice the ten-foot tuna skeleton lazing about the pier, with the pink flesh filigree that won't sun gray or decay. The sign there: No lifeguard on duty. Ocean dangerous. An understatement. An eyelash, and he's holding it up as if to will it freed, claim his wish trapped in that snot chrysalis. Holding it up like he would will it magnified. Like his eyes might glaze macro if he looked hard and left his eyes open long enough.

We would tell him better, but the ocean wind is exacting at ten degrees. All our track jackets lashed wrinkle-smooth around our breadbloat tums. Some shrill sound we cannot describe. We're all metaphysical in our thinking right now, though most of us here are not familiar with that word; maybe the sound of a track jacket in the wind can only be divined by metaphysical contemplation. There must be better word. Eyelash is a better word than nose hair. At least it is right now, right here. It feels like if we tell Jet this, the ocean past the cottage will erode whatever strength is left in our griefsick legs. As if opening our mouths to speak at all will demand another anonymous dinner roll into each mouth: No. I'm stuffed. I ate before I came. I couldn't. An ingrown hair has freed itself from my chin. I can't remember if I helped it along or if it was the wind. And that booger looks less now like it's skewered, and more as though it were a tree knot grown strong ‘round a rebar wound cast thru it.

The cottage road is red Caldera. Many tracks packed time and time again with mud. No gravel. Always hoping mud might make it better this year. But not yet it ain't. Low enough below the road—and perhaps by some miracle spared by the thorough wind—the ditch is brim-full and glass-still with Spring water, and that water is not in motion at all. But the mud underneath its stillness is still unfolding, exercising its right to endless crisis. And I know that it must just be the surface that is true to such stillness. But the whole idea of the water feels firm, a stage with drawn curtains to the math of the murk working out its incongruous and incalculable knots.

To the homestead from the cottage. Small Sydney tells us: It's a blanket to keep the potatoes warm. We've stopped so someone can wretch into the willing ribs of the highway's rumble-strips, also so I can safely root thru the glove box for fast food napkins, so there's no more snot on that leather jacket sleeve, on that jacket that lady wears so often (or at least she says so). A stranger feeling something just the same as me sitting in my passenger seat. Small Sydney comfy in her car seat thinks we've only stopped to stare at the tarped field of potatoes. And we only now notice it. And I think about how we slice up sickly potatoes with many eyes to seed more potatoes. And it makes me sick some.

In the Robin's' bathroom. I catch splashback piss splatter on my slacks. Still feel bloated even with an empty bladder. We've all made some unspoken pact to boycott Tim's and support Robin's; it seems sort of petty on a day like today, but their decaf does not trigger my acid reflux. A song that is not 'what is love' pulses as I cross the strip mall back to my car. It's a cousin—it's a woman's voice on this track.

Homestead. Someone's daughter is telling someone who is not here with us I need like a week off of feminism. I don't have room for this and for feminism. An uncle is nodding but for the wrong reasons, this man who never has room for two things at once, who isn't making wiggle room for grief in the first place. How do I know the person she's really talking to isn't here? I—I just do. Is she proofing it for sound by performing it as she types it? Or is she on speakerphone? The noise of this living wake is always full. Is there a man in the next room losing his voice because he won't take water, won't chew ice, for fear it'll sustain him?

Somewhere: I think taking time to grieve is sort of a classist luxury. As if it were a choice. But how would we know that? Some of us just in our twenties, distracted. Someone I've never met tells me: I like how when you blink your one eye lags behind reopening.

Tomorrow is my father's sixty-second birthday. And tomorrow is our dying friend, Kerras, his dog Calvin's fourth birthday; they will both be on a lobster boat, the salt wind sandblasting their respective pelts gray.

Tonight. I will drive home with the GPS so I can sob alone but still be told where to turn, even if my glasses are smeared with salt tears. In one kilometer arrive at your destination. Less an if than I'd like to admit. In five hundred meters take a slight right to a relevant elegiac metaphor. Swerve left to avoid that tabby, another creature undeserving. Yes, this is unsafe. Yes. Unsafe is an understatement.

Right now. Jet thinks he is two but he is really four. Larry has magnified the monies out of Calvin's hairy ear. Jet is trapped in the dog door, and Jet is yelling us on a loop: yeah, but what at the cost of the dog's youth? But whom would he parrot that from? I'm so mad it would come out of his mouth. That it makes no real sense, spit magnifying the ruby on his road rash chin.

And someone is in a room
trapped behind aesthetician daughter’s spraytan curtain turned makeshift hospice shade
pinned beneath the cool of a wet cloth on the forehead
paralyzed nipple down by cancer-soft broke spine
starving himself to death
because there is no doctor here at home
no doc behind a curtain
no doc underneath the cool of a wet cloth
at least not one with the heart
to lick thumb and pointer
and pinch his candle flame
or to steel their hand just above
and hold still just the same