If I reached out before me
and tore back the layers
of everything that is held so dear:
every construct
every platitude
every social convention
every concept of structure and form
every plan
every foolish notion of self-emergence

I'd arrive with alacrity
in the place where I stood.

It is an infinite elongation,
stars on a common fabric,
a seven-point-seven billion bodied
hive mind
disjointed and
uncomfortably confused.

Beacons of information
with eye and nose
chattering the status of being
over wires
over wind
relaying an unknown position to
a centralized unseen
command.

I?
I am the fist smashing the mouth of an old man
I am the final moments of an endless road
I gasp for breath just after the womb
I am the rattle and a wrinkled hand gone slack.

This is the ubiquitous ache of isolation and
this finite separation from the whole is
agony.