3.14 and counting

A million years from

now, none of this will

matter. I mean this poem

& all the others. Not you,

silly—though unless

you make the chronicles

of Terra,

painted like Da Vinci,

sculpted like Rodin,

sung like Etta James—

you’ll be nothing but

dust to dust.

So why am I sketching

the pupils of your eyes?

Swelling like a tumour when

you’re scared, while you tumble

down in unrequited love? 

Why add pigments

to your hair and creases

round your mouth as though

you’ve laughed your life away?

There is nothing

that is funny

when we’re gone. Except

perhaps that joke about the

snake & thirty rabbits.

Something about the eggs

placed out of reach.

The congealing of the yolk.

Why we spell it with

a letter never heard.

That it’s always been the

shell that everyone wants.

The profundity of its cracks.

No. Cross that. The water in

which it boils. Its sextillion

molecules. That its number

has nothing to do

with copulation. That it

rhymes with population.

That less & more are less.

None left to un-

earth the end of Pi;

why we feigned it

meant a thing.

Andreas Gripp

March 4, 2026

RF Photo