no cosmic soup

just a can of spaggettios

each once al dente perfectly defined circles of love

such great beginnings futile nugatory ineffectual vain

blobbing into a mush those stuck together in our can

dusty and forgotten on a sagging shelf with others dented

rusting in our tiny circle those we've touched in our lives

now stuck together rotting in sweetened safe sauce

into a glob each having become indistinguishable

once created to feed starving childrens of Africa

rejected sight unseen without a steamy spoonful

never used

we simply go on

becoming useless

in a forever eternity

an excess commodity

even food pantries refuse

mothballed obliterated

individuality erased

purpose forgotten.

I think

that we are all the tentacles

of a giant jellyfish.

When we die,

We don't cease to exist, we just go to the next dimension.

All of our deceased loved ones aren't really gone at all, but right next to us, on another frequency, that occasionally tries to contact us, hence, the "spirits".

I believe ghosts are remnants of strong emotions.

I must give credit to the very drunk girl who first introduced me to this idea,

Most memorable as it was strangely out of character for her to be so philosophical with or without inebriation.

She told me that ghosts are just the strong emotions of the people that have been there before; slamming the cupboards and doors in a furious rage,

filling the airspace with their anger.

And that they are most likely still alive somewhere else,

but the energy they expelled stuck, was ingrained into the space they occupied once, and I thought, "of course, if music can be recorded in the grooves of a record or a concrete road, then why wouldn't a vast outburst of energy be not recorded onto the grooves of the wood of a cupboard door?"

She made so much sense in that one non-sensical moment of hers that we shared.

And where does it all come from?

I don't think we will ever get to know.

I believe it is all compartmentalized.

We will reach the boundaries of what we are meant to know, and that is it.

We will be bounced back from the edge, kept fenced by the boundaries enforced.

And we had best make peace with this.

Maybe I am the center of the universe.

Maybe the world revolves around me.

The world doesn’t exist unless I’m conscious of its existence.

The universe doesn’t exist without my awareness of my own existence.

When I close my eyes to sleep the world ceases to exist.

When I’m dead the world doesn't exist anymore.

Nothing can exist unless I can perceive its existence.

The world cannot exist if I’m unable to perceive the world.

The universe doesn’t exist if I’m dead.

God doesn’t exist if He's dead.

I am the center of the universe.

The world revolves around me.

But what’s created cannot be destroyed.

And what’s never been created can never be destroyed.

No one created God.

God cannot be destroyed.

God created the existence of the universe.

The universe’s existence cannot be destroyed.

God created my existence.

I cannot cease to exist.

Nothing can cease to exist.

The world doesn’t revolve around me.

That is the most honest thing to say.

I made a pact with someone passed, that whichever of us should go first, we would show a sign, if there were some means of communicating from the other side. When the fatal moment arrived, I thought surely, I would be haunted to the end of my life.

Contrawise. Though, I had this strange sensation of absorbing the passing spirit that night--waking in a baptismal kind of sweat through every pore of my body.

The cut, since then, has been as if final. God knows I am all too adept at making shit up. What do we call it? --"self-gaslighting"---?!

No such thing. Perhaps I have failed to see. Maybe the timing is not right, for a sign. Maybe that Individual consciousness is still alive and knows that it would harm more than comfort, if sighted.

Or maybe, the door is barred. Or there really is, Nothing at all...

We just don't know.

Today I gave up

The fight against gravity

The ergs and the joules and the foot-pounds

Were just so much fluff to me

I concaved into a labyrinth

Of depleted energy

Spent potential and kinetics exhausted

And essential physics missing from the stuff that is me

When reaching the nadir and solid state crumbles

Your universe collapses

In fatalistic escape

To new universes that bubble from the hole deep within me

The vacuum scours the cosmos

To pull in the loose matter

That didn't matter to others before

But now, so much, matters to me

New realms broil out from the old

Better and more beautiful and decidedly needed

So that when defeated, I can cool and condense

And be forgotten as the universe that was the old me

Explosions detonate after implosion packs the muzzle

The flint rock is sharpened when stability fails

And life fires therefrom with an aim that is true

And the birth that is rebirth is a life new to me

They say there is nothing in vacuum, but it has light.

It has light and sound and fire of course.

We see asteroids, comets and stars,

All the planets and sun of ours

They are my power,

They are my fear,

They are the things I can understand never.

I've always felt that life as we know it began as it was expelled from the womb of the universe after a troubled pregnancy where the fetus, not yet born was already thrashing and railing against existence. The identity of the force that impregnated the universe with life doesn't really matter as far as I can tell. Who or whatever it was, it apparently had serious commitment issues because it bugged the fuck out as soon as the universe pissed a positive test for life. With no other choice but to see it through to the end, the universe groaned and bled a labor that lasted billions of years. Holding life against its breast, I have a feeling that the universe struggled to tell the difference between life and the bloody dark afterbirth that is death.

So, like any single mom, the universe was handed the task of nurturing life alone. Oh, she did the best she could, but let's face it. Life is chaos. It is supremely beautiful and profoundly ugly. It is as gentle as a feather's touch, but also revels in the fires, storms, and quakes of destruction. Life can love, it can hate. It can be profoundly indifferent which might be worse than even the darkest emotion. Life is brilliance and total stupidity. Life can bow its head in wise humility recognizing the benefits of change and it can arrogantly refuse to accept anything but stagnation.

What happens when the mechanisms that keep life breathing, fucking, pollenating, shitting, thinking, growing, creating, and destroying grind to a halt? Does it matter? In our foolishness, we sentient things seek to find meaning in why we're here or we pray that we fall within the benevolent graces of some deity. It's all a waste of time. Life is reciprocal in nature. The flower's nectar feeds the bees, the bees assist flowers in procreation by spreading the flower's gametes in the form of pollen from flower to flower. The reciprocal relationship insures that there will be both future generations of bees and flowers. Like the mutually beneficial relationship between bee and flower, humanity thrives when those who know teach the ignorant, those who have food feed those who are starving, and those who are strong lift up those who're weak. Helping others is one way sentient lifeforms nurture their sense of self while unconsciously heeding the natural reciprocity that affects all life. In addition, the nature of life is chaos and circumstances are never concrete. Those who have today may lack tomorrow and may then receive the help from those they helped in the past.

For those who seek meaning and reward from a deity, they act like a hamster on a wheel. They expend a lot of energy, but go nowhere. In the case of the Judeo-Christian God, everything is known from beginning to end by the God of the universe. This god knew Adam and Eve would disobey him and partake of the forbidden fruit. He knew Jesus would be crucified. He knows the end result of Armageddon. I'm also guessing he knows when or if the Detroit Lions will ever win a Super Bowl. If this is the case, our paths are set. No mystery there. No way to find a different bus to the great beyond. We will either enter the gates of heaven or be tossed into the furnaces of hell. Free will is only truly free if the end isn't preordained and known by a god(s). So, if Judeo-Christianity is correct, our tickets are punched already. It makes no sense to tie ourselves in knots trying to placate a being who had made its decisions before life existed. Still, try not to be a dick.

We all would like to think that something of us lingers once life has ran its course. Ghost, spirit, or a mass of pure memory and emotion that somehow joins the collective memories of all life that came before. I don't know if any of this is true. I know I exist now and can influence things now, so I choose to focus on that which is a given, not on the theoretical that can only be proven once I have no way to communicate if it is the truth or not. Frankly, I don't believe in ghosts or restless spirits. Why? Think about it. If ghosts existed, then the estimated ninety million thoroughly pissed Indigenous people that the Europeans slaughtered over two centuries would've made Little Big Horn look like a sorority slumber party by now. Us pasty white European types would've gotten a ghostly eviction notice way before the twentieth century. Sorry, no ghosts no matter what those stupid, fake ghost chasing shows might compel you to believe.

In short, life is the product of the universe's one night stand with an unknown entity that split as soon as the universe started craving chocolate, black hole and asteroid pudding with chunks of quasars mixed in. Trying to find meaning in life, if there is an epilogue after the flat line, or if your great-great-great-great-great grandpa haunts the location of the brothel where he got a fatal dose of drippy dick is pointless. What matters is the known. I know I can be kind. I know I can help others. I know I can speak out against the wrongs of this world. I can focus on the concrete, the obtainable, and hope that if there is an afterlife I can avoid the whole torturous, wailing, nashing of teeth, and pitchfork in the ass for all eternity place.

Life is a miracle, regardless of spiritual or religious beliefs. It baffles me how two cells can merge and eventually create a human life. As the cells divide and create more cells, each of them different and serving different roles that will eventually turn into the heart or the liver, I am caught off guard just how complex and beautiful that nature’s ever flowing river of creations just ended up becoming capable of creating life from so little. Bursting at the seams of these cells are the codes for an unique human being. Everything unfolds from them. Seeing the division only makes the awe even more visible.

Life is the product of biological soups that came together in just the right way and in just the right time. Evolutionary pressures took the original imprints and improvised thousands of different life forms in the process.

Death, on the other hand, reveals the limits of evolutionary miracles. For the religious or the spiritual, life goes on in the form of ethereal beings or souls that depart from the dead physical body. I know not what will happen to us when we take our last breathes. The only thing I know is that our bodies will one day return to the primordial soup of atoms and molecules, ready to be created into something new. Our skin, our hearts, our bones, our hair—all of it returns to the world from once it came from. In another life, we become other creatures or even a part of the very soil that cradles life. We become, once again, a part of the great exchange of resources. We become, through pieces decayed, a part of the whole that has existed since Time began.

Whether souls exist or not does not take away from the difficulties of goodbyes in our very human world, but I like to remember that we are already a part of something greater even as we exist right now. Everyday, our internal world exchanges with the world around us. Those who move on never truly leave us as they become apart of the wind, the water, and even a part of a new life form eventually. We’re always connected to each other in this way and our existence leaves a permanent imprint of ripples onto the surface of life that echoes forever and deep into the unknowns. No matter what happens, we are already a part of this world, engaged with each other in a multitude of possible forms. That is the beauty of life that is painted in stark contrast to the mysteries of the end.

As for the reality of death, it is nothing but a specter that visits the earth in the future, in the present, and in the past, to retrieve a soul whose countdown has reached zero, and to leave behind the body that contained the soul for long years and sometimes, short hours and seconds, leaving the body to live. The body is nothing but a container until the ghost visits its visitor, takes the soul and leaves the body free, so it returns to its homeland, the dust. To be kind to the body, we return the body to an underground grave to make it easier for it to return to its origin. If the soul does not die and the body returns to its home, isn’t death, in its literal sense, the end, just a fantasy or perhaps one of the answers made inside the mind of a curious person who did not find an answer to his question: What happens to the dead? If death is real, then the soul dies, and the soul does not die, but rather returns to the place of its birth.

Darkness, quite peaceful...

now bright with sound, crying..

This is life entombed in the womb of a mother for 9 months no matter the animal or person. Grown and taken care of to be pushed out into our own little vase "1,2,3 push".

Walking and talking watching as the mothers hunts for food down the aisle, pouncing at dinner our in the forest.

Life a beautiful home come from a spring, led to death a gleaming white light that takes us to a new world where glowing figures gather around one another welcoming everyone off the boat.

"Welcome one, welcome all"

All from different parts of this planet, animals cheer, people clap, and plants flourish. Some stand still wandering, looking to find the exit back to reality, but this is what has become for us the "new old". No memories resonate within them, but yet the longing of wanting to live lingers on.