Without it you wouldn’t be carbon-based.
Without it you don’t have the energy to make enough ATP to move.
Without it you sit in your room half-dead,
that’s why certain words leave the air knocked out of you.

That’s why social media is full of heartbreak, because oxygen is transported
through communication with cells
and you need to communicate to breathe
but sometimes all that falls out of your brain are maggots and worms.

Without it you don’t get a chance to fight for water.
You don’t get a chance to fill your lungs with the scent of someone else,
or with life after bursting from underwater.

You suffocate. Something is on your chest and there is simply no air around you to hope for,
if the world was sucked dry
you could only hope for the past
and you would cease to keep on living
because the past is not inhabitable.

Everyone who tries to survive there
ends up with dusty lungs,
and you need oxygen to live.

To enjoy anything requires being able to keep breathing.
You can enjoy life blind, or deaf, or mute.
But us mammals of stardust are contradicted – oxygenized little creatures
who survive on what burns us alive
because after all it is better to burn and suffocate on an overabundance of life
than to sit collecting dust and slowly taking in less and less.