If Love Is Not The Answer

How can a hermit be lovable? Me.

How can he ever love anyone? You.

How is it people live who lack

normal connections with others?

Easy. Who says Love is the only key

to contentment, completion, Life?

Just because it's the key for Tom,

Dick, Harry, Mary and others,

mightn’t still others be rightin’ their ships 

with another tactic entirely?—

meaning and occupation found

in dimensions like business or thinking:

of the length of life living on Earth as mammals,

(billions of years of it till we are Us),

or Science or Art of any kind, or Music,

Technology, Obsession, Prayer,

grasshoppers up from a barren field,

Our Entire Act in The Cosmos, puny,

and what we can do about it tonight: relax.

Try to get back to sleep, for Christ’s sake,

knowing these notions are bound to recur.

Be of Good Cheer, then unconscious.