All of me knows
how talking to each other
works. No decisions
get made. Always this makes
sense and that sounds good
or that is trouble but this is hell.
On and on until in the end all suns
explode, and that eternity
we thought we had when.
So much for that.

Maybe one of us could look
away, down at the river, say,
see the sun reflected
in the ripples, and standing there
see the constant stream
picked up from the banks
of another whole place
none of us has ever been,
a shred of what lies upstream,
soggy sticks, strands of grass,
a metaphor that finally the whole
barrel of me, yes, like monkeys,
recognizes but after an entire
lifetime misread by the head,
all the misled voices seem so much
misdirection and our lost selves,
without maps or charts all this time,
a mob-mind chasing its imagination
down the wrong roads.

Returning to that endlessly braided
space and time we thought
was actually that — forever — sure,
but that blinding sun blooms
and in 8 minutes 20 seconds
we are snuffed.
&
&

Michael Milligan 

Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer and graphic arts production manager. He took his MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College, thereby joining the teeming mass of writers with degrees of dubious cachet. He was co-founder of Poetry Oasis in Worcester MA and was co-editor of Diner. His book reviews, fiction and poems have appeared in Agni, The New Orleans Review, The Valparaiso Review, Chaffin Journal, and others.