The Fullfillment* Centre

We all have some moment in childhood when we tremble with apprehension in both senses of the term, luminous with the future and oppressed by the intolerable density of the present. It is an unreclaimable fullness of being, pained yet faintly ecstatic, swelling toward rupture, which self-preservation, in its timid cunning, obliges us to sublimate. What remains is a residue, a distortion: the particular shape that sublimation assumes—arbitrary or secretly ordained—the only livable remainder of an excess of possibility for which life itself proved inadequate.

You’re in the foxhole, once you have had kids.

Before you could be blithe about death, 

Your own, other's- affect some posture of 

Cynicism or indifference or rueful depth

Meditating on it with tented fingers, keen to impress 

at parties or down the pub. But now 

At least for me, it’s all just- please, please, please

Keep them safe or,

If it's going to be something bad, not too bad, not

Life-changing or death and as for me. 

Let me live long enough to get them through to adulthood, then 

You can deal with me as you please.

Entreating, something, anything, whatever agency 

sits at the centre of things 

And tips disaster your way on a whim.

It’s God, I suppose, I’m talking to.

Some force that can be implored with to intervene, 

So we won't be subject to pure contingency 

-banal accidents crossing roads or climbing trees,

Caught up in the spasms of the mad, the careless or the predatory. 

Or illness or disease or..please 

Please, please just let us make it through 

All the hazards. After all, most people do.

Or at least leave us be long enough so I can know- 

I paid my dues- 

to the Universe, 

to you, 

to your mother

When we were all down in the foxhole, 

Briefly together.