---
title: No nothing
genre: verse

project:
    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
    css: autocento
...

| While swimming in the river
| I saw underneath it a river
| of stars. Only there was no
| river: it was noon. You can
| say the sun is a river; you
| can argue the stars back it
| like shirts behind a closet
| door; you can say the earth
| holds us up with its weight
| or that it means well or it
| means anything.
|                 There is no
| closet, nor door; there are
| no shirts hanging anywhere.
| There is no false wall that
| leads deep into the earth's
| bowels, growing warmer with
| each step. Warmth as a con-
| cept has ceased to make any
| sense. In contraposition to
| cold, it might, but cold as
| well stepped out last night
| and hasn't returned.
|                      Last I
| heard, it went out swimming
| and might've drowned. Trees
| were the pallbearers at the
| funeral, the train was long
| and wailful, there was much
| wailing and gnashing of all
| teeth--though there were no
| teeth, no train, no funeral
| or prayer or trees at all--
| nor a river underneath any-
| thing. There was nothing to
| be underneath anymore.
|                        Look
| around, and tell me you see
| something. Look around, and
| tell me something that I do
| not know. I know, more than
| anything, that the world is
| always ending. Behind that,
| there is nothing, save that
| there is no nothing either.
|
| Nothing somehow still turns
| and flows past us, past all
| time and beyond it, a river
| returning, to its forgotten
| origins deep within itself.