The Agnostic’s Nightmare

In his dream he’s awake,
but sleepy, and he can’t make
much of his gray surroundings.
There’s fog.  The next scene brings

his head pressed into a warm pillow
by a pair of heavy, unseen hands.
Meanwhile, in real life, he dies,
and does not become one with the sands

of some cosmic ocean shore,
and is not, in any meaningful way,
enlightened.  Rather, he is reincarnated,
returning to life on a random day, hazy and gray,

and this time around he's an electron,
blindly thrashing about in the brain
of yet another agnostic who is
wracked with the pain of a migraine,

and without a reason, or a rhyme,
an awareness of the nucleus,
a knowledge of any past or future,
he pops in and out of existence.