I'm constantly writing an autobiography in my head, 
just like you, you know, the movie we make because we can? 
Self-consciousness is always a bitch, most conscious of itself. 
Descartes located it in the pineal gland–as good a place as any. 

I'm always writing and re-writing the latest version 
because there's no escape from the constant negotiation with 
and observation of and reference to yourself, whether you project 
yourself in time future or time past, usually in a heroic fashion, 
sometimes elegaically, as when your children 
surround your deathbed, weeping. 

Once I hoped to escape this insidious self-monitoring–
(insert your name here)–CE doing this, CE doing that, 
CE making a speech... I became so desperate 
for deliverance from the disc jockey in my head
that I prayed to Christ to halt the static.
It didn't work, obviously, for here I am—

But I will not apologize for my head, 
the gibbering stream of data I'm always sorting 
while pretending to be more aware of you than I am, 
nor will I apologize for undressing thousands of women 
in my head for purposes both erotic and aesthetic, 
nor will I object to being called "narcissistic" 
if you only consider how alike we are—
(Are you already thinking about 
your opinion of this piece and what 
people will say about it?)
 

God and Cheetos 

Don't we all want to meet God, 
engage invisible omnipotence in conversation 
warm and natural, as in why Pete Rose 
is banned from Cooperstown
and whether Augustine’s Confessions 
are more an exercise in literary narcissism 
than true devotion?  I prefer Pascal,
but what would God think?

Picture me and Him on a park bench, 
dispensing crusts to avian communicants
while sharing Cheetos from an inexhaustible bag—
perhaps we'd join the shoeless fellowship 
of mumbling schizophrenics or cuss 
at citations flapping from wiper blades. 
Could he take his own name in vain? 
There are some things even God can't do.

But if he is omnipresent we shouldn't think of him 
as passing through, more ourselves 
passing through him “whose center is everywhere
and whose circumference, nowhere.” 
Thank you for the blueprint that became my consciousness 
that I might scribble this, though circumscribed.
May I have your autograph?  In blood, of course. 
So rudely forced into human form— 
how divine it must have been when you rejoined yourself.
 

On the Anthropic Principle

Here at the spoke-ends of our galaxy
it is easy to forget the central axle
moving insensibly slow, still
the silvery-white dispersion of stars
soothes randomly until we impose a pattern,
like the Magi, like the Greeks.

And despite the most accurate of calendars,
dawn remains a wager until the great lion of the sun
peers over the plains with a growl of heat
and the day blooms and withers toward the violet hour
where even wise men arrive as strangers
because the arrangement is never the same.

As the latest layer of bones,
can we ever appreciate how far
the swan's neck stretched to uphold the head,
how far the spider's strand thinned without snapping?
Do we recall the dark alternatives dodged,
any of which could unmake us?
Always there were detours
where the river never creased the rock
that never rose from the sea
that never spawned a single fossil.

When light illuminates the Grand Canyon
in winter's slant at sundown,
the stripes of ages burn
with every visible color.
What is the color of a radio wave?
Only man asks that.