Appetite

We should have sex, or lunch, or hope

Portrait of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Aleksei Morgunov (1913)

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Appetite

by Bob Hicok

You really are alive. I know sometimes you think 
you’re not. That you’re a dream in the head of a stone 
or a bit of air whistling through a crack in a window 
forty two stories up. But you’re reading a god damned poem, 
so you better be alive, otherwise what a waste 
of consciousness or its doppelgänger, jazz tuba. 
Philosophers say we can’t prove we’re alive, 
but have you ever taken your suicidal car or bad back 
to a philosopher to have it fixed? Years ago, 
in the unemployment line, I met three philosophers 
and one king and one forest that had been bulldozed 
to make way for houses made from another forest 
that needed a lawyer if anyone ever has. I have, 
I don’t know about you. We should have sex, 
or lunch, or hope, just to get even with the abyss. 
Not the movie. I like the movie. The other abyss. 
Also goes by the void, or the darkness 
made of the feeling there’s nothing after this,
the shitty houseguest who won’t leave, who ate 
an entire black hole for dinner and complained
when there was no emptiness left for dessert.