I am late.

And as I am running down metal halls, past metal doors
hoping that the internal gravity works in my favor,
imagining the force of nearby planets
turning shards into shooting stars,
I remember.

I imagine her sitting alone at the table last night,
wondering why I never came home as I promised.
She’ll have dinner cooked, the finest meat and my favorite beer.
Eventually, she stops waiting.

I seal off the east wing,
watch the right engine hide stars with its last breath,
push men into emergency pods,
watch the shadows of space creep cold into my heart.
The stars have never looked so menacing.

I am late.

She’s dressed in white, form fitting fabric
whose end blossoms like a flower
that cost me two months salary, but it was worth it.
The music plays, apprehensive in her heart
as she imagines me surprising her with late entry.
She practices her reaction in the mirror.

The last pod shoots away,
as I attempt to force the corpse of a vessel
away from puncturing a scar across the land.
The heat of our descent will boil the blood from my hands
before I am sure.

Yesterday, I turned twenty-one.
I was born in July, but I can smell the holly of winter
and graduation is a block away.
Two months ago, I was sixteen,
trying to figure out high school and imagining
the person I was going to be.
Twenty years ago, I was ten,
boxing up my life and meeting friends who took basketball
just as serious.
Once upon a time, I was six.
As biology dictates, at some point I was even younger
But time is a dream I cannot grasp
I am not the same person I was then
as I am not the same person I was five minutes ago
if only due to the way my actin slides
and the way my mitochondria only carry
my mother’s DNA.
Slow and passive,
that’s evolution, not revolution.
I still feel like an ant
with a barrel of gasoline
waiting for a spark to set it
ablaze.

Let’s go on an odyssey, an epic
we’ll never forget. Let’s turn the world upside down,
fall into the sky, fly at light speed
and wish on white dwarfs and red giants.
I don’t want to wait for the time it takes light to travel
across a vacuum. Take my hand and we’ll reach
farther than footprints on the moon, brush off the dust
and jump. Impossible is the space between our fingers.

Let’s sail across the ocean, feeding fish and taming sharks.
We’ll swim to the depths, tickle coral,
watching polyps break free.
I want to learn to glow like jellyfish,
lose my eyes to detect predators.
We can lay out on the sand and let the sun turn water
into gas.

Let’s shrink to atoms and build proteins,
untwist DNA just to watch it coil into chromosomes,
increase ATP just to expend it.
Did you know one electron makes oxygen a free radical?
It builds up in your system just
to break you down.
I’ll be your helicase and you’ll be mine.
We’ll replicate, transcribe, translate.

When we were young, Carlos and I
were knights, taming dragons and slaying witches.
People told us we’d become disillusioned
with the world.
Carlos asked what disillusioned meant.
I told him it meant they’d stopped believing in magic.
Carlos told them to build a bridge and get over it.
When we were older, people told us it takes money
to make money and we’d never make any
by giving it away to bums on the street.
We never wanted to get rich, but we knew everyone else
thought they did. Carlos always said
with a little bit of energy you could get a lot back.
You have to wait for old bonds to break to allow new ones
to form.
It was true, we stopped believing in dragons,
but we found magic in the way
two snowflakes are never quite the same,
time stops when they first fall,
how people can create something out of nothing,
nothing out of something,
and the way change starts with a penny
but when saved up, becomes dollars.

A Jersey girl came along
and I started to think about angles of yaw
needed to take flight,
how the force of a kick skirts
the delicate line between winning and losing.
I’ve seen it all before, but not like this. Besides, seeing
has nothing to do with believing.
Corneas can't capture the vibrations of molecules or excitations
of electrons. Champions defy biology,
overcome gravity and I believe what goes up
does not always come down.
I want to know the point where focus takes control
of epinephrine, who’s cascade is initiated by the roar of a crowd,
but negatively regulated by doubt,
when to take a long shot or build up slowly.
I want to live the difference between accuracy and precision,
taste the dirt, become painted with bruises and scorch my heart.
A flag is heaviest when you carry it,
lightest when it’s raised,
worn as a cape and allowed to wave in the wind.
Countries aren't build, they're created created
denying muscles oxygen but allowing them to taste gold.
It's ability to conduct electricity astounds me.
It’s not about alchemy
but transforming sweat into tears,
fixing nitrogen, reducing triglycerides.
Not all reactions need light, some create it.
It’s only over when there’s not enough energy for activation.

B is for boy,
the neighbor I met at an age
too young to remember.
My best friend and co-conspirator.
Remember the time we tried to bury
your mom’s car
with sand from your sandbox?
Or when
we were chased by bees,
discovering your allergy?
B is for blue
Power Ranger at Halloween.
I was pink.
Then one day you moved.
When we met,
nearly twice as old as when you left,
I saw mischef in your eyes
and it was as if time never passed.
But so much had.
I was not the person I remember.
Neither were you.
But we picked up the pieces.
We moved beyond.

The man slips a gun into his waistband
because its cold embrace makes him feel
protected. In this country,
a few pieces of lead are more powerful
than words. (Not that the man can read anyways).
He watched his school disassembled brick
by brick. (Not that he learned anything anyways).
His teachers used class to sleep
and rumors say a boy, Jonny,
got jumped for opening a book.
Twelve people walked by before
calling the cops, who responded an hour late
because they were on lunch break.
The only math worth knowing
is that of the street: how much to buy,
the price to sell.
The probability of making it to supper depends
on judgements made
in the slice of a second and the block you walk.
The probability of supper depends on what you
are willing to give.
Everybody has a price.
Billboards advertise change
but the only thing that changes for him
is time.
In a country with so much
promise, the man is hidden in crevice,
pushed between cracks of the system,
where promises are scattered
glass on the streets he walks.
He is forced to gamble
with odds against him.