James McMichael

Summer 2024 | Poetry

Life Says

     If you’re awake to know 

you’re being made dead 

and then you are, 

that may well have been that. 

Having had your days and exited, 

 

it can’t matter 

how long your fathoming nothing then goes on. 

How long you’d fathomed it before you were, 

 

that hasn’t mattered. 

Out of the nothing it had been before you 

you plot as a fare-thee-well 

how you won’t be 

 

as soon as back to stay is when you weren’t. 

 

 

 

      An extant 

item’s required 

if time’s to bathe it, 

space to close it round. 

Thinking back 

 

farther than you can to 

time-space, from 

space back then 

time hadn’t fissured, 

 

their two-as-one was the only. 

With nothing stopping it, 

demure, 

 

through that whole reach time didn’t start in 

until I, 

 

Life, got to be decided for, and so Death too. 

  

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                               2 

      

     It’s been caused that I’m 

innermost for any seedling. 

Each keeps meeting its one 

fit with me there while, 

 

around us to the outside 

where all plants grow, 

 

extendedness happens.  See? 

 

 

  

     Space. 

Infinitely  

too big to fit 

without it 

are the 

 

(how many?) 

blood-rich 

spaced 

parts that are you. 

 

In the space 

your exit from 

me happens, 

 

infinitely too 

big you’ll be 

 

                                                                                                                                                                           3 

 

     Owed to Death always 

is that I be called away to it 

from anything I’m in 

whenever, since, 

indissolubly with Death, 

 

I’m inside that thing non-stop. 

 

Persons of course don’t, 

but if instead of 

dying them, you 

 

lived your exterminations, 

then we, Death and I, 

we’d be twinned even more. 

So God-foreign a 

 

two we’d be that after 

time together in each body, 

 

the more perduring 

 

second of us, one by one, 

would hurry 

back to the One, 

for good, all plural things, 

 

and I might be allowed along. 

All of them, though, of course, 

they’re at the last, in truth, all 

Death’s to be done with. 

I fail my cherished lost.  


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