Chinjenming

“‘Nothing’ is the force / That renovates the world—“

Ancient Captain Obvious,

My own ancestral spirit,

The residue of humans

Giving each other advice

About how to be human

(Which, when you think about it,

Is rather fascinating—

Either we need help being

What we are or we compete

By misdirecting others)

Never really existed,

That golden man, the great sage.

He emerged, like a fable,

From the clay of grave cliches.

To be human, be a ghost.

We’re always making nothing

From something, a new nothing,

A freshly labeled item,

A name—emptiness, the void,

Homer, Zoroaster, God—

And then producing, presto,

This nothing that is something

As the author of something

Where before there was nothing—

Number lines, infinities,

Epics, monotheisms,

The entire, damned universe.

It’s a trick where the rabbit

Produces an empty hat.

We need not-being to be,

Could not even hope to think

Clearly about what is not

Until we had a symbol

For not as something that is,

When something is what it’s not.