Tonight,
at the pool hall,
I lined up three shots
in my head
and made them
in near-military order.
I’ve played pool badly for years,
gotten lucky more than once,
but I don’t recall this happening before:
what I wanted to happen
happened
as I had imagined it would
in a game I enjoy
but cannot play well.
The flow didn’t last,
but the sudden knowledge of it
made me shiver
and nearly cry out loud:
I can learn something
still. I can improve.
When you’re ready,
you come by and see me
then. You spend a little time
on the work you need to do,
including learning to relax about it;
nothing says you have to be so damn serious
all the time. You do that work,
come by my house when we can talk
about nothing, casually, just discuss
the rain or some dumb TV show
that’s just fun, kinda thing that lets me
turn my own running monologue off,
and you’ll be welcome.
I spent too many years being serious
to like it much anymore.
It just kept stretching me
on a rack full of questions. I finally
answered most and learned that the rest
don’t ever get answered — we don’t learn
exactly how to love each other, we just keep trying;
we don’t ever light every dark cranny
of the mind, figure out the roots
of every thing we do or understand why
we blurt exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time
though we know it’s wrong when we do it;
we do not ever get our parents completely,
and war and peace and justice don’t happen
eventually, they’re mostly process issues
and there’s not much new content —
there’s always been evil in the world and it doesn’t go away
just because we think it will. We will always fight
the fight, ask the questions, answer in the moment
knowing there will be a new answer, or the same answer
will bear repeating, the next time it rears its head.
I know all that now. So if you want to talk,
if you really want to talk to me,
come prepared with beer, a bucket, and a lightning rod.
It’ll be stormy outside. If we’re struck
we’ll put out the fire. If there’s another flood
we’ll bail till the ark is ready. And we’ll do it all
a little drunk, a little happy, and a little certain
of it passing by at some point. It’ll be back,
for sure. We’ll be more ready next time
and in the meantime, we’ll laugh a little.
Hey —
are you
vessel
or conduit?
Do you contain
or channel?
Are you
content or process?
Are you intention
or execution?
Don’t even try to push me —
don’t care if you’re black or white —
are you, instead,
colonizer or colonized?
Oppression or resistance?
If you answer,
I could be any
and am all,
we can speak further;
but if you choose,
you choose
alone.
I am sick of wearing glasses.
I’d rather not see things so clearly.
When I take my glasses off
people are softer and I take more time
with them, listen to them more closely
because I can’t judge their faces
or their clothes.
I’m sick of wearing glasses.
Why don’t I just get in the car
and drive over them? or crush them
in the disposal? or shove them
into that box the Lions Club leaves
at the store so they can recycle them
to people who in fact want to see better?
It’s because I don’t want them to see better either.
I’m sick of everyone being able to see clearly!
If we weren’t all wearing glasses
we’d be less able to use the computers.
We’d stumblefinger over the remote — in fact,
who would care what’s on TV?
Turn the radio on! Or,
we could talk to each other more.
No more driving! No more reading!
No more work!
Let’s try giving our glasses
to all the people who don’t need them!
That would be the Great Equalizer.
They’d get us then.
It would be like living underwater,
all of us lost in the blur,
except we could breathe.
(And don’t start with “have you considered contacts?
What about laser surgery?” Don’t distract me,
I am planning for the future of the world!)
Of course, there might be people who would still see clearly,
who wouldn’t get a pair because the numbers
probably don’t match up. Some folks would still
have perfect eyesight and there wouldn’t be enough glasses
for them. (They’d probably all be
snipers and pilots. We’d have to watch that.)
Maybe we could pass a law?
Maybe we could isolate them somewhere?
Of course, we would have trouble finding them.
I’d suggest we make them new glasses
but we’d have outlawed the grinding equipment
and besides, who could see to run it?
I guess we could just hope for the best
in our new, vaseline-coated world
and pray for their mercy…
or, we could blind them.
Dark Matter 