you and I, sitting on the dock
fell into the sky
while talking about death
and what comes after.

you and I fell into the sky,
our backs left the ground and
we flew head first towards the
stars and Neptune.

you and i talked about death
and our evolving relationship
with God,
or whatever you decided to call it.


you and I spoke of what comes after
the stars fade
and we are left floating
in a lightened sky.

you and i closed our eyes
so we could miss the sunrise.
we are finding footholds
on the rings of Neptune.

I’m standing there. Looking in the mirror.
Trying to reconcile the fact
I will never be as beautiful as a fish.

Words are hard.
Make up is harder.
I’m attempting to apply eyeliner. Straight.
My eyes are growing big and my skin is
turning scaly, making it near impossible for an even foundation.
I forget about the eyeliner.
**** it.

You had said something about being the right shade of blue.
You and Karen talked about it in front of the infinite binary tree.
You tried to explain to me the concept,
shades of blue defining us
colors that blend, people that blend
what shade are you?
I didn’t get it.
Still don’t.
I have a slow metabolism.

I look down at my dress.
It’s something like cerulean.
I wonder if it’s an acceptable hue.
Now it’s royal,
robin’s egg.
Suddenly, fuscia.
The fabric feels like water,
it ripples up my torso.

Back to the fish thing-
my neck is turning gilled.
The waves are getting bigger now.
Maybe I’ll go under soon,
fully under water,
be beautiful enough for a trout.

I can hear the ocean in the pipes.
I am ugly land bound.
I am diving down my faucet.

Lecture twenty-three of first period of the last semester:
Today’s topic – “What went wrong with Wall Street”

The professor’s trying to connect with the class. He’s trying to have us look past
Sagan-like hair, black pants poorly paired with brown shoes, sleeves stained with chalk, an undeniable excitement in his voice when he says the word “canonical”.

He’s trying to get us to see a forty-four year old father who watches The Daily Show before bed, someone that’s hip with the times. He says something about Twitter and that singer in the meat dress. He references Charlie Sheen.

He draws a graph on the board with three lines
red: Normal
blue: Poisson
green: Cauchy-Lorentz

And we’re all thinking it- What the **** is that green line.

He begins.

Cauchy-Lorentz:
fully defined by two parameters;
x-nought and
gamma
mean;
undefined
variance;
undefined
meaning
­graphs drawn in green have fat tails
meaning
a summation of green graphs with fat tails- a summation of par bonds will default with some non-zero probability
meaning
Lehman Brothers should have taken statistical physics

That is his joke for the day. Only students paying attention and students who bother with current events and students with a sense of humor laugh. It’s a small subset.

The kids in the sixth row aren’t listening, the ones in the Greek lettered shirts with their pledge names on the back and their laptops open. Sixth row is just close enough to look like they give a **** but far enough in the back so the TA’s can’t tell they’re checking their fantasy football teams. The TA’s sit in rows one through four.

The joke is for the kids in the sixth row. Anyone in the first through fourth, the ones considering graduate school in higher dimensional theory or quantum chromodynamics, doesn’t know what Lehman Brothers is, least of all a par bond. A joke about spherical cows? Laughter from rows one through four would interfere constructively off the chalkboards, but that is not who Sagan-wannabe is talking to, and the kids in row six aren’t listening.

They are watching Sunday night highlights, ignoring green lines and fat tails because, let’s be honest, they’re only here to get the answer to the question on the homework that they couldn’t find online.

The sixth row has taken what they learned in the lectures before this, the semesters before this one, the first days of classical mechanics, where they learned the universe is governed by predictable and definable laws, and given a set of initial conditions one can determine an outcome.

Salary|physics degree:
fully defined by one parameter;
sophomore-year internship
time;
ten years
mean;
one million

The sixth row Facebook’ed their way through the undeterminableness of quantum, the green lines on the board now. Their laptop screens hide the fat tails describing the bundles of par bonds they will be selling upon the completion of this semester.

This place is void of sound I walk
at night to catch glimpses of your
stunted wings through Akatarawa and
Whakatane I walk through darkness
waiting for your call your weak
reminder that you have not left
this place your plea for remembrance
in Aotearoa. Little bird, where is
Tane Mahuta now as the trees come down
for wider streets in Muriwai I walk
under moonlight trying to be unseen
like you trying to be mistaken
for the landscape in Rangitoto.
Little bird, I wonder what you
have done in a past life to deserve
no flight I imagine you are Maui
and were sentenced to a land-bound
life among the Pohutakawas and
Wheki-pongas and we have made
you our martyr thank you for the
fire.

at 6 i thought disney movies held the key to all of life’s answers.
that i could somehow talk to cats
and some day i would transform into something beautiful
as petals fell from roses.

walt disney, he promised me the sky was something constant.
he promised me it would listen, promised me it would respond,
most of all promised me it would stay forever.

its fifteen years later and i’m somewhere like Auckland
and i’m screaming your name to the billions of fireflies
stuck in the tar up above.
it’s something like 3 a.m. and i’m confused as to why you’re not answering,
why my words are being responded to by no one.

last time we spoke you said you were somewhere like Monaco,
or some other place with a **** name that evokes images
of long beaches, fast cars, and strong drinks.
and you said, “i love you,” and you said, “i’m busy”
and it’s been something like four months and i’m starting to think

that walt disney knew nothing of inter-time zone romance.
because if he did, he would know that the sky is
only a matter of perspective
and there is nothing constant in the waning of the moon,
or least of all the stars.

you are somewhere like Monaco and we are on
two different hemispheres. and i see now
that there is more than space between us
because as i look at the moon
you are staring at the sun.

you hung
suspended.

i watched you sail
led only by
gusts of wind
and car exhaust

i imagined you were a kite
or a song
imagined pushing you
with my thoughts towards the water

greedily
i watched you
hang

while
amplifying the sunset.

In the basement sand is melting.

Imagine that, millions of years of crustaceous love stories, rocks slowly poisoned until they, along with ancient deep sea lovers, washed ashore to become the nuisance of the crevices of leather seats of automobiles.

In the basement the rocky lobster lovers are taking new shape as
the girl in the goggles
with the hair
tied back into a bun
forces air from her lungs into the
sticky
clearness.

That can’t be very good for you, breathing in a million
(maybe more)
years of betrayal and ****** and friendship and laughter
between ***** and clams.
It can’t be healthy to take
in so much at once.

I wonder what it’s like to speak a language known by so few.
To walk down an aisle in the supermarket and reaching the curves of a coca-cola bottle,
the girl in the glasses
with the bun
cries uncontrollably yelling,
“Do you see that?
All the beauty and the sadness
in the waves of molten sand in
six little bottles.”
To give your soul a little clear house, letting everyone look inside
(without really seeing)
letting everyone walk around it, and nodding and saying
“Oh will you see what she did there?”
and seeing nothing but a misshapen
coca-cola bottle.

In the basement backbones are being melted into a new mold.

They are somewhere hidden in the waves I cannot read, amidst the million years I cannot hear of crustaceous love stories.