There is taking off
and there is jumping.
One for up and one
for down.
There is sitting in
a garage and there
is waiting, in its air,
to drown.
There is falling for love
and falling for gravity.
There is the clatter of
your fallen crown.

A drop in the bucket,
a nail in the wall,
the wind lilts east
and an acorn falls.
A grain in the sand,
a change in the weather,
the wind shifts and
we are not together.

Next door the king who’d ****
a sorcerer on sight,
Merlin is living plain.
He nods at me on the street;
we know what secrets
can do to the sane.

The bigger the tree in the front
yards I pass, the more my eyes
narrow, focused on the hunt.
If I’m quiet and choose my
moment just right, I can catch
the future I want. Don’t look
at me that way, like I’m all
the songs I haven’t sung.
I have only ever been young.

Gnats are just a nuisance,
Mosquitoes are a threat,
Fireflies are a fleeting try
At remember instead of forget.

Space all fills up with futures
that flow between the cracks
of everything like water:

everything is murky thick
with what we could have had,
bay windows and granddaughters.

I swim through the parallel universe
in which you and I hold up
your father’s old desk between us,

tilting it to follow the bend
of the stairs and leaning it to rest
against the wall of our new place,

aching with the weight of it
and with the possibilities for how
we’ll organize ourselves together
in this new space.

An apartment that is empty
but not hollow.

Eating takeout on the floor
and imagining the bookshelves
we’ll build tomorrow.

Hit me with that difference
between nodes and cores
and processors, between
being me and being sure.
Tell me again how to
calculate it, I missed the
first time, don’t shout--

remind me the difference
between comets and asteroids
and meteors, and how computers
and space are not the same
because to me it’s all voids--
the Perseids could be anything
as long as I get to watch
something else burn as it falls.