Hope

we might yet show them all;

those who doubt true belief

who break when they land,

those who don't hold hands,

who don't climb trees.

we might yet stand on a corner embracing 

like two teenagers.

like lovers outside of time

stones shaped by the waterfall

or the wind in your hair

like better weather.

we might yet pick up the flame

move it further than anyone believed

and the sound that makes sounds like a voice

but manifests as a beam of light

we haven't failed, the sound says

we've only nearly started.

#internalsummer

the sky today
above chicago [hands reaching up]
breaks beauty in half &
tears down everything
but the truth;

[deeply azure &
self-assured,
the grand vista of 
dominance & judgement;]

reaching down to us the clouds
caress the tops of 
our steel-&-stone
[hands reaching up] as a 
proud but patronizing parent;

our children are less than children,
[hands reaching up]
when the sky stretches farther
than your poor, wide eyes
can see all at once;

our needs are so small,
your love is so small,
& each of us thinks everything
is happening to them
[hands reaching up];

who is doing this to you?
[hands reaching up] voices,
reaching up,
all of us [as well as I]
blame the sky.

Infinite Obsolescence

As the fine-grained sand under Robert Paulson's G-Boots began to shift & swirl, he raised his head in what would be his last desperate view of the ship. Great yawning holes were beginning to appear everywhere in the narrow field of vision allowed by his ENV helmet, marking out a hellish obstacle-course on the unfamiliar ground of this alien world. Blinded by optimism & panic, Rob began to run across the disappearing verdant sandscape, leaping awkwardly, never taking his eyes off the ship. He barely felt the ENV suit automatically assess his rising biostress & add electromagnetic pulses to the joint components, allowing for faster reaction time & lift. Only dimly aware of the mechanical assist, a growing lead weight deep inside his stomach told him he would never make it to the airlock before this odd jade-coloured sand swallowed him. With every step his speed increased just a bit, just a little bit, but his mind saw the ship receding from him, incrementally; inversely proportionate to the hot zinc taste of fear rising up the back of his throat. Unknown to Rob, the standard-issue ENV suit became aware of his situation, monitoring both Rob & the environment. The artificial intelligence of the suit began the calculations that would ease Rob's transition to oblivion just minutes before its own unplanned, and infinite, obsolescence began. Bit by bit, as the suit began to increase the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in Rob's breath recycler, Rob began to lose track of his panic. He was still facing the ship, but what had been ground beneath his feet was now empty space as the final fragments of the first supermassive asteroid discovered by humans disintegrated under him. His legs pumped empty space, as parts of his evolutionary biology not used in a hundred thousand years tried to swim through the blackness, to no avail. He began to slowly twist in the gravity-less vacuum, and was lost already; his ship, his wife, and the few others of the crew would be taken by autopilot back to Sol-3, according to mission protocols, and this no longer frightened or saddened him, now deeply sucking at a 100% oxygen mix like a calf at his mothers' udder. In his final, Boddhisatva moments of calm, his brain, spurred by the penultimate cocktail of adrenaline & endorphins, sparked a memory of the last thing his wife said as he prepared to enter the airlock: "We live in the future, honey. It will be alright; we've thought of everything." 

5 Haiku para Espana

1

tonight Chicago

sees the same beautiful

moon you saw last night

2

unless you did not

if you did not see the moon

that haiku is moot

3

there is a man here

thinking of the moon in Spain

you might be the moon

4

if you were the moon

he would like to be the sea

lying beneath you

5

if you were the sea

he would live on the shoreline

just to talk to you

For The New Year

Lonely as I am

I think of giving my love to women that are likewise lonely.

Love's absence is only occasionally without cause;

humans can be ugly, we 

can be petty & terrible, or vain as death. We can be cold, 

careless,

callous, or crazy;

but like attracts like, 

mine would be lean [or small], adorable,

undoubtably crazy.

So I look for solitary women around me,

who talk to themselves,

or drink too deeply from the wells of adornment,

those who have much much more love for pets than people,

who fear the accidental eye contact & seek to remove the risk

burying their gaze in fiction

they who have all but turned their back on our 

collective modern madness.

I want to love them. 

All of them. 

All of you.

[One at a time.]

You deserve love,

all of you.

that which cannot be understood 

by those minds who flock with fashion

[& mock passionate depth]

is the greatest resource of all. 

Your own unique ways

[when I am allowed to see them]

drive me to contemplate dancing,

right out on the street, 

dancing.

You have concerns.

You have worries,

bills, family problems, 

baggage from the last lover,

your boss is an oblivious ass,

you have student loans,

you have cystic fibrosis or lupus,

you don't want to end up ruining our long friendship,

there are a million reasons why it seems like a bad idea,

and you're probably right.

We are all mistakes to be made. 

Mistakes become stories.

Friends become stories. 

Stories become memories.

Our memories are our last friends. Even if we make this mistake 
together, we will still, 

once again,

be friends.

As To Beginning:

it anchors feet
to concrete and
tethers inspiration
to the wearer.

the colors are
myriad, mystifying,
carelessly colliding idolatry,
save for those
too poor to matter.

the voice I heard
spoke to me a litany of memories
of our rapidly-changing
neurochemical landscape.

it drives us via rhythm
drives us towards desire
and teases imaginary hands
toward unfeeling heaven.

it was the sound
of forty thousand insects
being crushed by the
tiny, gleeful fists of children.

the voice spoke as a
multitude, a host,
unverifiable in enormous, overwhelming,
blessed volume that
captured us bodily,
nailed us to this corpse,
& forces us to love.

[*Response: We will never be free.]

We are enslaved by survival; *

We are chained to each other; *

We are rooted in the dirt; *

if our work would lead to supposed Paradise; *

We will free ourselves when breathing the air of every being. *

6 Year Marker

on rare days
in any weather
moments least guarded
eyes barely register
mind drifting
pedaling
I see you on the street.

already  passed by
no looking back
pondering invisibility
adrenaline
did you notice?

long
years
don't
erase;
they
retaliate.