The ice between us fogs from my breath,
as even the distorted, crystalline figure I see from here
is beautiful.

You couldn't hear me tell you that anyway;
my shy voice cannot pass through our glacier.

I wish I knew if you could see me from here;
have you fogged your side as well?
Or do you prefer the sanctity of the ice?

I cannot find comfort in the sparse, lukewarm words
that find their way to me. However,
I press forward, chipping away
with my timid gestures,

hoping to hear the true heat of your voice.

I believe in what we have on this Earth,
what we were taught to covet as children
but not to love, at least not to love it enough,
because the stuff that we hold in our small tender hands
contains the sands of the hourglass that will bring change
to the world, that will rearrange the future to the way we see fit,
and when we've finally found what "it" is for each one of us,
that "it" that we hold so dear, the one thing we are told
that we have, but that we may not hear or see or feel,
but we can love,
that is what I believe in.

I do not see a God watching us,
or a demon plaguing us with filth and sin.
I do not see a God who is with us through thick and thin
or tells us what to place our trust in
because that is within us, trying to come out,
trying to finally be free from society
that has stifled it so. Even through piety
and faith, which is a word that I've heard
so much it's lost all meaning to me,
people will lose their inner voice,
their heart that beats with the sound of an infant's cry,
their brain that tells them why they try so hard to know
all that they can, their legs that carry them forward,
and their wings that fly them there even faster,
and when that goes,
then you have nothing to believe in.

But I can hear my voice,
and I am no God, I am no supreme being
whose will is law, that is not my job,
that is rightfully the job of every one of us,
a sentient democracy, even though it is no democracy,
for in such a system you cannot hear your own voice
amongst the billions of others, your brothers
and sisters and fathers and mothers
who may not know you,
but all share something in common.
We all believe in what we have on this Earth,
to some degree, some solemn singularity
that is not singular, some point of view
that is not angular, some déjà vu
that is not irregular, and we hold on tight
to the prospect of a light at the end of the tunnel
through which we fly with no end in sight
and we don't stop to ask why,
we just keep going.


I believe in what we have on this Earth,
I believe in futures and education and the Internet,
just think, we have built ourselves the Internet,
filled with endless promise that may scare some
but we can all share our forward consciousness,
flying along the inside of the tunnel
like zeros and ones, telling us yes
or no, stop or go, think or know,
but there is so much more.
We have enough knowledge to make maps
of the gaps in our universe, where only
several billion stars reside,
each with exponential potential
for there to be so much more
than what we can see with our eyes,
than the farthest reaches of our voice
in the infinite size of the universe we call home
which we think we own but we know we don't,
because while there is doubt,
there is so much more.

That is what we should be taught to love
as children, so that from day one, when we look
to heaven above and see nothing, and we climb
the highest mountain and sigh
because we see nothing,
and we finally fly out the end of our tunnel
and we cry because we still see nothing,
we can know that what we see
does not limit our mind, only our eyes,
and how far or how high has no end,
and while we can search for the way
to perch ourselves upon the apex of the universe,
wherever that may lie, there will come a day
when what we believe in becomes what we have,
something we can hold in our small tender hands.
We must never lose sight of that day. We must
fly to the light at the end of the tunnel, we must
beam out our voices in zeros and ones, we must
search for our "it" in every corner of existence, we must
learn and teach and pass things on to our futures,
we must never forget what seems gone,
because we will know everything stays with us,
and we must never, for as long as we can love
and look up and say the delicious word "sentience,"
we must never stop believing in what we have on this Earth,
because there is so much more.

I

I am but a vessel,
nothing but insides,
realizing size
matters
when the squirrels
come by,
hungry.

II

Having survived
adolescence, I
compete with my
friends for light.
They grow,
so I must, too.

III

Standing tall,
I realize, above all,
I wasted my time here,
waiting for time's ear
to turn towards me,
giving me somewhere
to shout my worth
into the Earth.

IV

As I watch myself
tumble backwards,
I would cry if I could.
In my prime,
perfect--
for a bookshelf.

V

So now, I have to carry
burdens
that aren't mine,
knowledge
that I can't know,
and dreams
that I can't tie ropes from
and swing.

VI

Forsaken.
No room among sorrow
for fleeting hope.
Fallen friends,
brought here by
similar misfortune,
will be here still tonight,
waiting for their ends.

VII

I am dirt,
nothing but
what crawls through me.
But I am not alone.
A vessel,
blown in by the wind,
cradled in my embrace.
I admire its cunning,
its determined hope--
but as it grows,
I look back on days gone
with envy and repose
of the life I pass on.

A man in a hotel
witnesses some smoke
on his television
shot from a news copter
flying quite high
above the town below,
above a school, where
the schoolchildren of
Ms. Appleby’s class
turn in their papers,
but clamor to see a
woman on the side
of the road, who kept
her eyes on the road,
but crashed anyway.
The woman was calling
her husband- you
couldn’t see this from
the helicopter- but John,
her husband, was on
vacation in Hawaii
and will have to return
to his children, who
last told him of their
combined A+ in a project
written about the dangers
of cell phone use on
the road, done for their
teacher, Ms. Appleby.
John of the hotel
hangs up his phone,
and sighs.

I don’t believe you.
There’s no way you could have
fended off those velociraptors
and their inter-dimensional captors
with a spork and a water gun.

No, you didn’t go into the matrix,
or find an heirloom of the Norse,
or find a cure for when your throat gets hoarse.

You most certainly did not bring forth
Satan with a glass-blown tuning fork
and those pictures you have are photoshopped.

A seismograph cannot detect a pulse
from that distance, you would have to be close,
so it did not help you defeat the devil,
which you’re undoubtedly making up as well.

You cannot throw marshmallows
into black holes, you would be crushed
by the gravity, far sooner than pushed
within marshmallowing range.

You did not ****, nor disembowel
a mutant roll of paper towel
nor did you invent the interrobang.

I wish you would just please quit trying
to convince me that you came back from dying
especially after you weren’t mauled by a bobcat.

You did not inject yourself with nanobots,
or anonymously author a Times Best-Seller
about the struggling wife of a poor bank teller.

Stop deluding yourself, Johnny, it was only a dream.
Son, go back to sleep.

Half&Hal;;

Simply, half and half
makes a universe in a cup,
filled with cream and milk.
Know not what it is
but know what it is
not, and where it is,
(and if you dare)
know why it is.

Really, the bassist plays,
His universe is in a cup
filled with groove and rhythm,
he knows what that is.
He knows what it is not,
where it is found,
and why it is.
(and he does dare)

Simply, to know the contents
of your cup of half and half,
to spill it out and fill it up
again, ponder its past,
present,
and future.

Really, to know the music
that flies from your arms,
to hold them out and raise them up
again, ponder the chords,
  rhythm,
and progression.

Simply, you miss out.

Really,

You miss out.

I come from the green winters,
the beady drops of sweat
running like lawnmowers
down the side of a face.

The bugs, bugs, bugs
and freakish hailstorms
of the way-down-south.

I come from the trash-can lid
that I made a sled and took flight on
soaring over the inch-thick ice.

I am from howdy-land and yeehaw-city,
but the thing is,
they really weren't.

I come from a fascination with rocks,
the round ones with the white stripes
and the white ones with the round stripes.

I am from bee-stings and wasp-nests,
and the kind ointments that were
whispered into my battle wounds.

Down the side of a cliff,
running like lawmowers,
the beady drops of sweat
come from green winters.