A Fruitless Orchard

Everyone in my life is insane:
The men, women and children.
Have none yet, biologically at least.
But I’m parenting everyone
from my father to my best friends.
Counseling as both psychiatrist and rabbi,
doling out prescriptions and advice
when they all need me to talk them down
from whatever tree, window ledge
or altar of sacrifice
they have dragged themselves
on top of willingly.
Their instability eclipses my own,
I allow it and that begs the question
of who I should be mad at more?

In them there is a craving
for structure and order
often belayed by
a self destructive pattern.
Yet no matter how much
they polish and fellate
the phallus of chaos,
the worship is pointless.
Eventually backs are turned as they get older
and deny it at the moment of climax
like a time stingy whore would a struggling john.

Those moments are the end of gestation
for the epiphanies that teach us
that everything is an attempt
to crawl back into the womb from
sleep to sex
and asking for someone to care
about anyone else’s woes
is pretty much the same thing.
Any hope of stitching the chord back
between us and the peace
of existing in nonexistence,
the watery warmth of pre-birth
or possibly death, that was severed
on our zero birthday is shed. A waste,
not a pity.