The wretched sound
I mistook for tires squelching flat against pavement
Is actually the timely torrent of water
From a broken sprinkler head
Four houses down the street
First soft wet dribbles
Then increasing pressure
Until twenty or so seconds of geysering
Then nothing for ten seconds
Water pours loudly into the soaked mud
And everyone else sleeps.

It is sudden understanding
Which brings me back to you
Which pushes me back into your arms
And makes me swoon at your eyes
And it is always sudden despair
Which turns me away
And leads me back down a smaller path
That pretends to have never known your name.

The space and time between who I am and who I was
Isn't really real, says quantum theory
It's all happening at once
Just a cacophony of every everything that ever was
Exploding simultaneously into and out of existence, just
Bubbles squeezed into one another, growing larger with each input,
And our brains can only receive the signal of this three-dimensional, one-way version of things,
Can only translate it's movements into the illusion of straight time
Can only hopelessly trouble itself with relatively unimportant matters
Like the physical, emotional, ridiculous distance between myself
And you, my sweetest, loveliest darling,
Who are so perfect and so fluid
You might as well be the only matter
That ever mattered.

Except that maybe distance is what makes my heart yearn for you, maybe it's
Not some romantic magic formed in the dust of ancient stars,
Which whirled and grasped in the post-nova, until sinking this way and that, forming bonds and making plans,
Just like any other college graduate,
Never expecting to end up as part of a human being billions of years later.
But then, when do we ever live the life our educations prepared us for?
Hardly ever.
Right on down to the particulars.

She asked if I could I said "yes but
I won't."
She asked why not, laughing all the same,
And I said "because I
Prefer not to."
Then she got really serious,
Her eyebrows scrunched down hard toward her nose
And she said "you're on
Borrowed time."
I asked her what she expected me to do about that
And she said "live more."

Origin of language
It's my dream to understand
Why and how
And I think it was
And it is
The human need for individuality
Betterness
To be at the top of the hierarchy
Which has sparked the vast expanse
Of spoken and written language,
The cheap signal communication style
So characteristic of human beings
Has everything to do with the need
To control and create
But the joke, ultimately,
May be on us
For when you create less than what you destroy,
You cease to be the creator of your own destiny,
And become instead the destroyer of your own fate.
Listen to the whispers of dead language
Which creep through your DNA
And understand.

Our bodies contain too much Mercury
From eating too much fish
Our drinking water contains too much chromium
From weapons testing and industrial pollution
Our media contains too much violence
From saying "all me are equal" but not really meaning it
Our hearts contain too much apathy
Because there's just too much.

15 years ago today
I was ten
And kids were getting pulled from class
Taken home by worried parents
And all the kids were watching the TV sets
In their classrooms
Except for my class
We were not allowed
The teacher
mrs. coyer
Said
"You all see soon enough. It'll be everywhere."
And I hated her for not allowing us to know
But when I got home
And I did know,
I understood
She was trying to protect us
From the image and the terror
Of death.