Radio 30 Seconds From Now

Elevate where you’re at,
no gravity for action, no
hard Earth-bound limit
to a kiss. Hell, zoom
past orbit! Fealty only
to what we all could be
in just 30 seconds time.
Let’s see...

Cowboy and a miner....
They talk about the sun.
More of the story later.
(We write time.)

Take the word ‘love.’
Now put dollar signs to it
as they do, but knowing
it’s not the same as touch.
(We write distance.)

Just as a wind arrives
a limo outside the office
some days to haul you
far into the forest. Smells
of minerals and old water,
as all that’s dead refuses
to be swept away, discarded,
and living is all the brighter
for it. As the shock of daylight
at funerals—impossible
for some of us to mourn
long. (We right death.)

My one problem? I don’t feel like accepting a chain of humanity where I add a sentence to the book of awareness, die, then a reader picks it up and adds the next sentence. That’s how insects do things. Me? I want to know it all right now, and then say it in such a way it’s the Pyramids...the Grand Canyon...the Great Wall of China ...the big, knowable thing that we might finally discover in 30 more seconds, then make it visible from outer space.

Be the amplification
speaker for whatever
is wired through the soil
into our bare soles,
as I wait quietly
somewhere of so little value
there’s no fence around it.
Imagine!

Still with me? Well,
the cowboy told how
he’s got skin cancer
now, but he still calls
cattle home at night,
with church organ lungs.
The miner coughed some
more, some more, some more,
some more. Ain’t it funny, two men,
one dying from our great god sun,
one dying from the dust you must
dig to find. You get a chance
to know there’s no way to win.

But a world of stabbing lights!
Like the day that red bike
was born to me, beneath
a hooker Christmas tree.
I’m sure I forgot to breathe.
No childbirth ever that way!

Think of one thing you’d like to keep
even if you’re offered eternal life
without pain to hand it over....
what are you holding onto?

As if nothing scared us as children.

And ocean waves had their own source of light!
(Poets lie to get to the truth of things
because scientists refuse to teach
what they haven’t proved, leaving
almost everything entirely mine!)

And here comes the law I enacted today:
Hunt your future like something you’ll eat
so tantalizingly 30 seconds from now.