I can never leave all the kindness I have felt in this apartment,

but if a big black iron wrecking ball comes flying toward me,

zoop, out I go! For there must be

kindness somewhere else in the world,

maybe even out of it, though I'm not crazy

about the emptiness of outer space. I have to live

here, with finite life and inner space and with

the horrible desire to love everything and be disappointed

the way my mother was until that moment

when she rolled her eyes toward me as best she could

and squeezed my hand when I asked, "Do you know who I am?"

then let go of life.

The other question was, Did I know who I was?

It is hard not to be appalled by existence.

The pointlessness of matter turns us into cornered animals

that otherwise are placid or indifferent,

we hiss and bare our fangs and attack.

But how many people have felt the terror of existence?

Was Genghis Khan horrified that he and everything else existed?

Was Hitler or Pol Pot?

Or any of the other charming figures of history?

Je m'en doute.

It was something else made them mean.

Something else made Napoleon think it glorious

to cover the frozen earth with a hundred thousand bloody corpses.

Something else made . . . oh, name your monster

and his penchant for destruction,

name your own period in history when a darkness swept over us

and made not existing seem like the better choice,

as if the solution to hunger were to hurl oneself

into a vat of boiling radioactive carrots!

-excerpt from "The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World," by Ron Padgett