High Voltage
Give me liberty or give me library books,
book cards stamped full of yesterdays!
Am I a teacher or a court stenographer
recording life’s paradoxes? It depends.
Have you learned anything from this fly
quietly dying, trapped in a spiderweb?
Or from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland?
Pencil in your answers then stand by for
further instructions. If you could see fit
to transfer me out of solitary, I promise
to stop trying to escape whatever this is.
It’s dystopian family night, every night,
and I am buying! I wish things lasted,
but the menu constantly changes. I’m
afraid of meaning, so I rub my feet
on the carpet, sending little sparks
from my fingertip to your arm. That
shock, that tingle of recognition, is
the one thing I am trying to preserve.
Not leitmotifs, or chalk numerals on
a blackboard, but a stream of charged
particles passed between two people,
okay? Ready, set, zap! Our bodies
two light bulbs transferring energy,
illuminating a colossus in the dark.
Olympus Mons
In the movies, satellites in outer space sweep across
the exosphere of our planet, blink red, make sounds
like a truck backing up, a lie told by sound editors
since sound carries by vibrating air molecules, and
no air floats in space, so I guess this is my way of
breaking it to you I canceled my pioneering flight
to Mars. I would much rather scream into the void
on Earth, than a vacuum of empty ether in space,
and where would I put my beach glass collection?
Too many things I would miss. The flowering of
crabapple trees in Spring. The scent of rain, and
a green city park. Little things. Toothpaste spat
into a sink. Paying too much for a Maccciato.
The squish of sand and ocean foaming between
toes. Ordinary men and women, too. Not ones
with degrees in astrophysics who gladly squeeze
breakfast from a tube. Real people with real fears
who carry their anxieties like Sisyphus up the hill
then trudge down, only to do it again tomorrow.
Accidents, illness, pain, malfeasance, misfortune.
People with a fear of darkness, without actually
floating around a spaceship in it. People tethered
to the smallest, most ordinary of daily miracles:
a hummingbird’s whirring, a sunset lighting up
clouds the colour of cotton candy, the laughter
of two small children bouncing in a trampoline
in a neighbour’s yard. What might I say if I found
myself walking the red dust canyons, dry lake beds,
extinct volcanoes of Mars? If I found myself alone
on the summit of Olympus Mons, sixteen miles
above the planet, I would say Home. I miss home.
It's All Going To Break
Today, I am steering myself into fresh agonies. The rain
falling heavily appears to be boiling the surface of things.
Despite the pummelling, when the rain stops, the grass
releases an aromatic scent that, if it were a foreign word,
would mean love. Would mean forgiveness. I’m terrible
at future-casting. I slept on Google and Apple shares.
I invested in what no ear has heard, no eye has seen.
I walk around couples taking pictures of each other on
sidewalks. Age is “shrinkflation.” The visible world
grows ever smaller, despite it taking three connections,
across a day, to reach Koh Samui, Thailand by plane.
Memory is a Homecoming Weekend where trees still
line the cobblestone path and the campus quad is eerily
deserted, except for the one cannon sitting prominently
in the centre, where some random joker has painted it
with the words, this is not real. In sum: do I cry or sing?
Even if the years were unkind, they all retreat in the end.
By then, I will be a pile of carbon ash carefully scraped into
the world’s most expensive marble jar. The news says
climate change, the Right and the Left, brick and mortar
retail stores, everything is going to break. Well, speaking
as the frequently broken, nothing is beyond repair.
I’m giving up skepticism’s time-share. I’m renegotiating
the terms of my lease. I want a clause that says I deserve
my share of happiness, my little plot of dreams, a summer
sans brush-fires, a 50/50 draw in good luck. I need
a first aid kit of laughing gas. A bushel of smiles.
Something to poison my anxieties with joy.
