Morning, the
moment, the thinking,
the trying to decide
what foot hits the floor first —
the grounded one that clings to earth
as strongly as a root, or
the air-walking one, the one that climbs
any offered cloud or sunbeam.
When I choose instead to hover
an inch above the bed,
close to a surface but not upon it,
defying the expected authority of gravity,
my feet twitch,
but only for the time it takes
to accept the delay
and return with me to sleep.
you hurl “boy genius” at me
like it might still be the dagger
it was when I was young
nowadays it’s more of a big stone club
I don’t bleed as much at once
but there’s so much more broken inside
back then it felt like unalloyed jealousy
now I get the aftertaste of carnival
with a note of freakshow — so you should know
that “boy genius” hasn’t worked out so well
it’s been a lot like walking the carnival ground
after it’s gone and trying to stop a memory
of ghost bells and whistles
and undead cheesy organ tunes
from smothering me
when you use those words like that
I see your loathing and raise you tenfold
putting all of my own into the pot
knowing that
like all good carnival games
this one’s rigged
because this planet
requires me daily
to suspend my disbelief
because madagascar exists
because there is
an amazonian waterbug
that can eat a pirhana
because of mitosis
meiosis
and
parthenogenesis
because of the praying mantis
outside my window
those swallows
that miss the ground
every time they swoop
and the cat who returns
after a month
from who knows where
because of the nazca lines
pyramids
mounds and henges
all built here
by people from here
(with no help from saturn)
because it suited them
to expand
their own notions of how much
the word “human”
could contain
because we haven’t caught back up to them
because of hurricanes
that swat human arrogance
faster than giants ever could
because there is no getting past
the housefly –the eyes compounded,
the lead-glass wings
what is more fantastic than how sleep
deadens nothing inside the body
how we live
in spite of brain death
every time we sneeze
how every step
is a controlled fall
all of it science
none of it fiction
I’ve thought about this
for a long time and decided
that utopias are mostly a fantasy
of putting a god’s powers
in the hands of someone
with mere human self-control.
Were I to have the powers and
the self-control of a god,
I suspect that
all I would decree would be
a levelling, a balancing.
Things might end up looking
much as they do now, and
all of us would be
disappointed in me,
much as we are now.
Dark Matter 