If the world was right
And all was just,
Our souls would be conjoined
Without any choice of freedom.

For what good is freedom
When feet must leave,
And lips must part,
And hands grasp only to let go?

The earth spins 'round
And orbits and tilts.
The winds whip and continents shift
And nothing is ever still.

The universe itself is locked
In a rush toward infinite expansion
'Til one day every atom will subside,
And all will freeze alone.

What good is freedom?
What good is Earth?
What good is this whole ******* cosmos
If leaving is all there is??

I do not want to move.
I do not want to walk or speak
Or disconnect your hands from mine.
I will be totally still.

But it is not enough.
The **** universe conspires
To draw us to our knees,
And wish for one more hour

Just. Like. This.

Right now in the Arctic Circle, it is twilight. The sun has hidden from the vast fields of snow, and it will not return for months and months. Not for all the love in the world. No kiss can conjure it. No hug can replace its warmth. No secret whisper or extended hand or careful laugh can reverse the orbit or adjust the tilt of a rock hurling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour.

I am frozen, my love. I can no longer see the light. The months stretch out like an abyss before me; a semester's worth of sorrow. You cannot save me, no matter how sweetly you try or how desperately I want you to succeed.

We cannot fight the sun, my love. So let me go.

We are told to "make lemonade"
As we inhale the bitterness
Of wages and rent and hunger,
Student debt and job insecurity.

We are told to squeeze ourselves
Tighter and tighter
Until we are made of bones
That crack like whips to the time-stamp tune.

Flesh, they say, is the enemy.
It is weakness and untamable.
It does not fit neatly, and so must be destroyed.
It belongs in our beds, not the workplace.

They give us lemons so **** they burn,
And tell us that we're lucky to receive them.
They say it is the natural order of man and machine.
But the fruit of our labor is a lie!

Today I learned that lemons are not fruit.
They are not found in nature;
They have not fallen from heaven for us.
They are engineered by a snake in the garden.

Lemons are like wages and rent and hunger.
They are like markets and stocks and *******:
A human invention we are told is better for us
Than the Apple we once killed ourselves for.

Today I realized lemonade is the enemy!
It's not the cost of bread or the breaking of backs;
It is the dismal comforts we construct
To tell ourselves that we are free.

In a 2013 study, human scientists wished to know
The depths of the heart of the common rat,
And devised an experiment to prove that
Empathy can exist even in the smallest of creatures.

The scientists, in their logocentric wisdom
Born out of centuries of Western philosophical tradition,
Metaphysical assumption, and scientific methodologies,
Trapped one rat in a tightly confined space and watched.

To their small-minded astonishment, the rats performed,
Again and again, the role of savior to their fellow rat.
They did this without need for compensation or compulsion
And, if given, shared the reward with their de-caged brethren.

But what the scientists failed to realize is, as is often the case,
That they themselves, with all their complex cognitive capacity,
Had failed an experiment which the rats navigated with ease.
For it was them who had caged the rat, and rats who set them free.

Such power does a porchlight possess
That it lures a thousand insects
To fry in the dewy-white comfort of its glow

Where we see the mundanity of a helpful object
Moths see beckoning beams of moonlight
Like Icarus soaring too high at midnight

Perhaps God in all his alleged wisdom
Could never have imagined the horror wrought
By positive phototaxis and the electric lightbulb

Perhaps this whole **** world is the unintended
But deadly consequence of a God who could not
Predict the ways that lightbulbs and moonlight
Merge to Mock him.