If I didn't know better, I'd say we are all
hurtling toward an unsustained future
in doppler echoed waves of an emergent return
(by which I mean an inevitable collapse). We have been
pressed up against the glass so tightly
the shape and shadows of outlines everywhere have shifted,
and still: we are keeping our eyes peeled for inevitability’s escape hatch.
(But doesn’t it seem, sometimes, as though the earth is saying goodbye,
goodbye, goodbye, and even that the look in our eyes
as we gaze at the sky, a bloom, a song sung nb in the distance
is a tender wave of parting?)
Our hearts break, falling deeper into a disappearing future.
Tell us again about how trees grow, our hearts say again. Tell us
about the promise of a morning on a sunny day.
Tell us again about bumblebees and the mantis’s prey.
There are so many dying hands to hold.
(And how will we be remembered, exactly?)
The weight of worth is measured in gold and scripture,
they say. They say our mouths are useless,
they say we are free. (The we in their mouths is so small,
and so trapped we are, here in such a great, trembling land.)
There are no secrets left, no sanctuaries unthreatened. We tend
the hearts of those with raised voices
Even as the ICE cold weight descends, pressing
Our neighbors and all of their prayers
into the back of windowless disappearance portals.
Oh sure, some speak into bullhorns on crowded streets
(every once in a while, anyway),
but where are the listeners? The ones ready to lean in and tear up,
opening again to a shared remembrance, a sweet tickle at the edge of thought:
fireflies. We have all known fireflies, haven’t we?
Haven’t we all once introduced ourselves to crickets,
one summer evening long ago?
And so it is that we now set lovefires in hearth and intersection. Our blood was entered into
an unwilling pact that predates our birth. We have been taught
that our truth is a violation: we add this lie to the fire, too.
The lie that always leads to another clear cut, dried up crick, earth-cracked path
to the nowhere future (greed’s inevitable offspring).
Our feet are now stomping their dropped-in return to rhythmic connections,
our fears opening in the dissonance reconciliation nightmare dance
of survival, each movement a resistance to the classist mathematics of eugenic economics.
(Our resistance is unpermitted,
for we are not the ones sidelining approved routes with disapproving signs.
We will not be known as the soft-spoken ones.)
We are ready to introduce ourselves to those
who still cry our forgotten names from under the pavement. (The soil is always
waiting for intimacy.)
What we are saying is, we are
saying we cannot waste time, we are
saying there's nothing left to lose,
there is nothing, there is nothing
left to lose.
