They have gathered once again, celebrating their freedom
From the tyranny of cable and storage space
(Assuming the requisite hardware and appropriate licensing)
A chummy confab of vendors and visionaries,
Ex-socialists who left university to sail with Greenpeace,
First lieutenants doing their damndest
To appear at ease in civilian polos and khakis,
All comers from all corners to congratulate themselves
On breaching the divide separating mere data from magic.

Two or three blocks down from the convention center
A narrow storefront hosts an exhibition of ether-only comics
Operating outside the nettling constraints of editors, of syndication
Sits, under an opaque and slightly scratched piece of plexiglass
A yellowing comic of uncertain vintage
In which a cat, unbridled by panels, gender, or standard grammar
Is the recipient of a mouse-tossed brick whose flight,
Unfettered by probability, physics, even time itself
Squarely strikes its target, the projectile itself
An inexplicable alchemy of confusion, mirth, frustrarion
And the impossibility of an undeniably pure love.

She had gone on hiatus from her terminal felicity,
The languid lassitude having progressed from ennui to irritant
(As one second-tier deity in the pantheon bitterly noted
Immortality is just another word for ******* monotonous)
Coming to this plane sans the flourish and fol-de-rol
Normally accompanying earthly descents,
Having arrayed herself in such raiments
As seemed apropos in such a place,
Tresses tucked away under a stained Farmall cap,
Figure somewhat obscured by a hoodie and camo pants
(Yet drawing more than her share of too-long glances,
Their progenitors sensing something
They hadn’t apprehended before,
The provenance of what stood before them
But dimly understood yet clearly a thing apart)
And she spent an indeterminate time in that scruffy burg,
One-block main drag footed by the schoolmarm-staid courthouse,
The gas wells and second-tier chain-store concerns,
Chance encounters with doe and bobcat on the few side streets,
Hence returning to her eternal domicile
As inauspiciously as she had came,
And if one of her compatriots deigned to show interest
In respect to her time among her lessers
(The inhabitants of the terra firma
Generally regarded with a dollop of noblesse oblige
And a considerable helping of scornful disinterest)
She would become somewhat taciturn, hesitant
Characteristics almost unknown in this stratum
And she would speak, almost in wonder,
Of how those she had sauntered among,
Saddled with their inherent imperfection,
The constraints yoked upon who they were
And the realm they inhabited
(Even the landscape, glaciers gifting them
A higgledy-piggledy of lakes, dumpling-esque hills
Over-dramatically christened the Endless Mountains
Short on true grandeur or majesty)
Yet still cognizant, still struggling to attain
An ideal of beauty which they could never be privy to,
And for some time afterward it was not uncommon
To see upon her unspeakably striking visage
A faraway look bordering on discontent.

He’d always heard them,
Not voices per se, but kinescope snippets
Bereft of context or continuity,
Peripheral visions of Yeatsian sprites
Sepia-toned silent vignettes
Of vaulted ceilings and high-backed chairs,
Their presence exacerbated by a lack of counterbalance
(His children long since putting this place
Squarely in the rear-view mirror,
His wife sprinkled hither and yon in the back yard)
Giving them an unwanted prominence
In his relatively tumbledown existence
And on one morning somewhere near
The handoff of gray February
To its somewhat more promising successor
(Such things as times and dates
More or less extraneous minutiae to him at this point,
As he’d become more attuned
To changes in the light upon waking and settling his days,
The frequency and sounds of the transitory geese,
Sounding for all the world like disappointed suitors
Found wanting by the fickle maiden
Of this plane of existence)
He’d stepped outside and viewed
What appeared to be a robin,
But in a color not of its species,
Perhaps not of any spectrum known to our kind,
And though it seemed somewhat familiar,
Perhaps from some childhood fever dream
Or bacchanalian teen misadventure,
It stopped him in his tracks,
So much so that his neighbor,
His primary interaction with his fellow man,
A mixed blessing at best
Leaned out his front door
(Partly concerned and mostly amused)
And shouted Firs’ robin of Spring, Buster,
Not your first and mebbe not your last.
And Buster, shaken back to whatever it had been,
Regarded his neighbor with an approximation of a smile,
And retorted Be OK if you were right
Just this one time, I reckon.

As our thoughts turn to such things
Purported to be the province of springtime,
We search the skies, the flora, the dirt its ownself
For portents and signs, some nod from the ether
Suggesting the arrival of completing part,
Some corner piece to our lovelorn jigsaw puzzle
(Such burning bushes not extant in the cosmos,
Merely chimeras and red herrings
Sprung full blown from our wishes and imaginings)
And having perhaps said the hell with all that,
We find ourselves bamboozled, wholly undone
By something subterranean to our longing,
A soft giggle, a smile we'd overlooked heretofore
Subsequently awash in a thing of some divination
Wholly beyond our notion of free will
(But such conceptions just schoolbook fol-de-rol,
Rendered superfluous by the embrace
Of that which, had we had a choice,
We'd have embraced without a whisper of hesitation)
And having our preconceptions scattered
Like so many petals of some loves-me-loves me not daisy,
We titter softly under our breath,
As our deities are not the only ones to have a chuckle
At our well-thought-out conniving.