Opposite Our Math Is Peace

Shock, yes, if tears were suddenly to turn, and fall up,
where we’d watch them shoot back through the clouds
to find every sunny day lost to this sad reverse of rain,
but our experience is so small a plot that such surprise
seems merely fencepost and wire, first bump of beyond,
as the volume would ring no great GONG, accustomed
to (example) war follows war, as we are. Blood on TV

is a sofa in the living room. Math purity! Locust love!
Peace? Not on your life! Might as well make a Caddy
fly as untick and distock this clock! Much like genius
in plane design, new alloys, composites, aero...only
brings more of what we expect. Manufacture & devour!
Create & destroy! Expand loss! A warm-hearted hug?
Don’t make me laugh. Free, yes, and you can’t ever

get enough, but no one can sell it, so it’s not the stuff
of good employ, as we must step in order each stone
we see stretched across a creek, and can’t imagine
a busboy who refuses to be a waiter. Each morning,
we open the door to the same old front porch. Yes,
yes. It’s still there. Jeez. The old shrubbery waits
to be trimmed with the latest axe when it’s on sale.

Purchasing is now the primordial soup. Ooze out!
Rebirth yourself outside the lines we’ve mapped
with fear, lust, $$$, years you surveyors peering
deep into a television set--loop of training films,
and how revealed truth appears to us a mistake,
a thing to ridicule, as I could be wizard enough
to turn into, say, a bicycle tire pump! Forget

years of discipline and abandon, just wait for
the laughter to die (Shapeshifting’s the thing,
stoopid, not the thing!) Sure. Ignore this poem.
Or use it to tilt the world off its axis. Ha! You see?
Extravagance is to be loved and adored, naturally,
in the monsoon season I bring to this page. Or,
well, I’m just another mailman delivering the junk

new facts, with tired, sore, mass-produced feet,
like naming state capitals, never having argued
against the tide barging into the shore because
no one else ever has. See this as a garage to be
cleaned Saturday afternoon. Maybe a previous
tenant left a toy under the workbench...diaries...
love letters...art once held on refrigerator doors...

Unearth wonder! Balloons and fireworks lie buried,
or in those eyes haunting the cubicle next door.
Be curious now!? Then, demand the world be
set right, as if the homeless know what they do,
the worst ruined with mouths gnarled, gone gargoyle.
Truth remains to be spit out like a choke of phlegm,
as in our physics of light and consciousness, so

a drowning man sees himself in a film screened
into the seaweed, and we cannot distinguish
between knowledge and death, more aware
we will soon be gone, in our brief Constitution
for the Martydom. Live life as if you chose to,
and accepted death as a penalty fee. We vote
with blood, and better yet, liftetimes. I, too, can’t.

But, thank you for hoping it could be possible,
as we all cancel all our applications nightly
to download and upload so we are joined
in any event. We maybe get a glimpse,
Saviour? Not one of us. Sure we could watch
a coal-black stallion turn to glass as it charged into
an airport, and all the milling merchant commuters

will still make their flights. Our greatest need, amoeba-
like, impossible to not be where people are. We breathe
company, fish that cannot swim away from Lake DNA.
Dear reader, you are safe here because gravity works.
I won’t leave you, and that’s how poems get buried.
I knew who I was when I had a future; but a past
disintegrates ideas of extravagant function, shock

of finding we’ll kill the prototypist with everything
we do. What all was destroyed by fork? And who
all have died so that I might hold this ignition key?
We flagellate propulsion with 12 billion feet and stop
at walls to argue and fight and spraypaint names
until one of us says, “There is no wall. Watch me.”
Poets serve as traffic cops at mirrors on the mist.