The last thing

And there's a last thing that was the first thing and always emerges when the only truck you'll have with life is honesty. You know it though never the right word.

And the Jews say God's name is ineffable.

The thing sits in you as the legacy of your birth, enameled up over centuries in dramaturgy, a bemoaning both the beginning and purpose of language, the allcry of the newborn blasted with pain. This thing is not loneliness though loneliness articulates its earthly sense; and it's not sorrow though sorrow enrobes it. Nourished by absence and presence entwined, the thing opts for worldlessness, a thereness like sudden violence or the authority of a storm.

The wall-clock's metronome keeps apace with its digital counterpart on the screen, each tick signalling a terrible loss, the horror of irretrievability. The torment of man's ingenuity, the need to by calculus or statue or dumb gashing name this thing. Shamen reinventing themselves as doctors prescribe around it; houses of shouting men and women would with writ or verse would lash it to a pole, paper it into stillness for study. This thing that means you can't ever keep your child or a tear of outraged hurt or of the joy preceding it--the great benevolence, leveler, death for life and the reverse describing the quintessential moment. This thing, it defies nothing, embraces the imbecile, tolerates the wise, never lets go. Never in it is a tick forgotten or remembered. Paradox its subterfuge, our agony, all passion. This thing that hides the harder you seek is right around the corner, there, on that bend you know so well, there in a mirroring blade of grass from a morning sun thirty years ago you were sure the first and last, the enduring one.

And then it happens. Invincible, you feel this thing make an etch of you, an afterthought held in mimeograph. Artful at last, you are testament to streaming tears, you are the laugh ever echoing, you drink from Keats' urn, you wallow no more, becoming it.

But, oh, for one more first kiss.