Not long ago, if you could call a few years ‘not long’,
when I was still gloomily drawn to that mysterious magnet
known as the mighty Mississippi, I uncovered a nautilus fossil
not far from the Tennessee-Arkansas border, where the land
churns like red butter into the infinity of the Mississippi.
A nautilus hundreds of miles from the closest deep water.
(And only fifteen minutes from Graceland!)
They say most of the Deep South used to belong to the floor
Of some vast Jurassic swamp or sea or river—I forget which…
In the grooves of this shell-rock nature keeps its own history.
No stranger to change as the dust and mud reveal me.

Think how much change
you’ve witnessed in your life already.
Today, tomorrow and yesterday change is a hot-traded commodity, up in the Dow,
down in the Nasdaq, two day super-shipping in the fast lane.
Change customizable, ordered up and hot and ready-to-go,
the hobo on the street asking me for some change;
I told him to change his ways, get a better rate,
exchange those rags for a business suit and some britches.
He just laughed and said: “Huh, are you kiddin me?
In this day and age a man can have twenty lives in a lifetime.
I’m just asking you for a little change…”

It’s been done to death and back a million times this age.
My friends are always telling me I need to change my ways.
That I need to roam and range, that all wise wordsters roam and range.
“Change you can believe in!” But let’s just change the channel.
Onto something else, something new! Everything built for the times,
none of it made to last. See how we age and distance so fast!
Two million years in the making, we’re living proof of the past.
Don’t be a stranger to change; sit back and enjoy it while it lasts.

The boy in the park with pigeon eyes
“What is the rake of human history?” he asks me.
Cruelty and pathetic little bird-like people,
all their seed spent carrying half-ton rocks up
to the tippy-top of the Tower of Babble.
If you possessed a machine of infinite light and speed
would you go back to before change existed?
Could you resist it? Or would the blackness then lead you back to now?
Wondering how—how it all got started.
Change is strange, only the rabbit knows
how deep the rabbit hole will go.

All our lying lives spent flying,
and when we finish no one starts and no one goes.
all of us pondering the unshareable experience.
The world keeps winding on an invisible string
but the weight of the wait in line is unbearable.
A raindrop falls from the sky and hits the shell-rock in my hand
And looking down at the nautilus fossil
I get a chill, for it tells me there are creatures
without words, without hearts, dreams or ears
that have slithered through the dark untouched by change
      for millions and millions of years…