Gift for Augustine (a poem)

"There's a demon inside of me," she said,
"It creeps when I'm not looking, and
it's slippery as a bat in flight when
I am."
A thousand miles away, a fire burns somewhere.
A thousand miles in, it starts to lick
and, acid-like, eat you.

But that's not the worst of it.
No, the worst comes later,
in through your ears, like tuning into a radio,
and sits
and waits
for you to fall asleep, so it can
sink talons into your dreams
and wait
for you to forget, as an animal on its prey,
but something reminds you
a circling ferris wheel--the way skin feels
that every
goddamn
thing
is changing.

O death, come slowly, but come every single day to remind us
that we live in eternal recurrence,
that everything that happens
has already happened:
...or is that just another one of my stories?

In any case, a duck on the side of the road,
a lady in waiting
our fragile egos
remind us to sit on balconies and feel
near your closeness,
and let us not forget:
the separateness of things.

So, to answer you, Conor,
the counterweight to all this death is simply this

I can't stop this.

And not to get too heavy
that's just what it feels like
to behold all the light.