loneliness like
someone’s scooping out my insides.
loneliness I haven’t felt
since I was a child.
loneliness like my organs in a bowl
on the table next to me.
like frozen fingers falling off in the cold
like itches scratched to the bone
with already bloody nails.
more than anything else,
embarrassing.

loneliness like
no one asking after me.
it’s different than being alone on the planet, no
there’s people everywhere,
but they have nothing to do with me.
an astronaut on earth makes no sense.
an astronaut on earth is separated from everything.
you can’t see my face, can know me, can’t touch me.
something in the air? what would I know of that?
I’m in my own little filtered world.

but at the same time:
get over it kid. you’re an adult now.
you’re not the only one who
collects and counts and praises little miseries
like beads on a rosary. far from it.
you’re lucky actually, so act like it.
you’re not a planet or an atom
just cause you’re cold and rocky
and there but also not.
you’re not the only one.
you can get over it,
move out,
move on.

an astronaut sees the big picture
but can’t see the trees. can’t feel through the gloves.
can’t breathe. an astronaut walks out on the wings
of the space station with a plastic umbilical cord
tying the little thing back
to the metal box it came from.
an astronaut knows
there isn’t necessarily a correlation
between amount of blood an amount of pain.
an astronaut knows they’re just a pound of flesh
at the mercy of the vacuum.
an astronaut knows no sound
and knows no one
and knows alone.

earth involves a lot of falling. everything falling
all the time. the space station is always falling,
always in free fall actually. an astronaut jumps
without falling. when astronauts come back to earth
they tend to drop objects as though they will float.
an astonaut forgets.
an astronaut puts the suit back on
and wades into the ocean
to remember the feeling.
to get rid of the noise.
an astronaut on an earth cliff
is betrayed by intuition.
only one astronaut falls at a time.

kid, you’ve got to give it up.
get out of the cardboard box and back to work.
get out of your head. get some bandaids
on those paper cuts,
get your head screwed on right.
is there still someone there?
to lift me out of the mess I’ve made
by the armpits and put me gently
in the grass?
I was a bright kid once, I think.
I was excited and I could touch the grass
and not the sky.
I was excited to give it up.

is an astronaut human? or more machine?
or more plastic? or like a bug with an exoskeleton?
is an astronaut still an astronaut
when there’s nothing left in the suit?
does an astronaut have a past? a future?
do astronauts remember
what it feels like to fall?