Mark Kraushaar nails it.

What It's Like

It's like you look back
and there's the first half of forever
which was nothing to you since you were nothing
yourself but there it is stretching way
beyond the beginning
of the beginning of anything
because it is the first half of everything
which is what the absence of you had been zipping through,
and so imagine your exits: Stone Age, Age of Reason,
Renaissance, etc., or, say, 8902 BC, or 1396, or 1464,
or 1982, or maybe when the landscape finally
looks familiar or attractive or instructive enough,
someone—who but you, but there is no you—somebody
says, Well, this looks pretty good,
and so all these tiny bits of carbon and hydrogen,
nitrogen, and calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and sulfur
copper, zinc, iron, and bromide
clump up in somebody's belly, clump and grow,
clump and grow until you spring forth
in a bathroom south of Akron or a cab in New Delhi,
a bedroom in Ames or a pool hall in Brixton or an ER in Boston
which is what it's like exactly, except, except
pretty soon you're wondering why
you couldn't remember to remember
that route a little bit, goddamn it,
your roots because now here you are
and it's the middle of the night and you're in the kitchen
scanning the classifieds or thumbing a catalog
or slicing a pie and you look up
and there's the stove clock saying
2:10 and you're all
wound up about nothing again.

-Mark Kraushaar