when the bad things come
i starve them,
when good passes through
i launder the linens.

the cornets blow
and i brave up straighter,
the weather knocks, i put on
clothes.

i pay all the debts that make it back to me,
and the chores get done
eventually.

but as a friend
to a startled, starving anchor,
or as a citizen
of a chronic coughing country

i have no clue
just what to do.

Like a hound sniffing,
a boy groping,
ivy climbing,
we hover cursors
over choices
of things we wonder
if we'd like.

She's gold
with a heart of a ******,
laughing off-key
at you laughing on-key.

Future temples
will make her prettier
in their statues,
will stain the wrong glass
in all the wrong ways,

and it is just then
when the truth that she brought us
will begin to be forgotten.

novels are rocks
to be kicked and chipped,
impress that they remain.

poems accumulate
like ash,
are made to breeze away.

you swam sleepy by
in the sweaty spring air,
drunk on pollen
and nowhere-to-be.

a few speedy flutters
like sharing a secret,
you went on your way
to porches unseen.

An army
conscripted
from neighborly realms,
mismatched
but straightbacked
in clumsy formation,
armed to the spine
with the strange words
of fiendish friends,
an occupying force
of Sunday afternoons.

They've come to make war
on our boredom.
They've come to free us our time.
They will marry the sons of our
doubting
and build new nations
atop the chipped marble
within.

How do you end the future?

Palimpsests
of first footsteppers.
Old starships
and kidnapped daughters.

For forty years we've watched
the screens of lower stars,
their clean floors
and hateless dilemmas,
taking tours of the best of us.

Our problems,
their past,
left lightyears behind.

And the next generation
is always always next,
like planets first federated,
like first contact at last,
a speech undelivered.

An ending that satisfies
may just well be
where no man has gone before.