Another one for Bastion

Leave Me

Dance with me to music that doesn't fit
your paws. Tell me stories with whines and barks
and the looks in your eyes. They glow with amber
and gris, the color of a fire in autumn. Chase me
down the driveway, all brown and red burning down
the street. You could always run like a greyhound,
a blur like a deer in summer forests. Rush out
the door when I'm not looking, force your way
between my legs. Keep me from taking life for granted.
Keep me from forgetting. Follow me. Move your
feet, we are waiting in the car outside, waiting
for you. To run around the car after high school days
and we pretending you are velociraptor, come to enrapture
us. You could always make me smile, a warm fuzzy
presence in a world of cold, blistering. How I
will miss you. Your nose on the back of my knee,
suddenly, spooking me. Climb into the bed
and comfort me when I am sobbing. Comfort me
now that you are gone. I want you to be stardust
spiraling through galaxies and forests, living
another life. Without want. I could see you running
through forests on another plane of existence, but I fear
that like the tigers burning in forests damp, you
are merely molecules spiraling into the soil. We each
build our fires high, and you have fallen.

Chase me down the driveway, out of your memory. Bark
at me as I am leaving, to remind me, to leave me.
Leave me loving you.

A poem for Sebastion, who lived 14 years

There is no snow


Whenever it fell, gentle fireflies at midnight or graceful dander in midday, you were unhappy.
It was cold, perhaps. Or maybe the way that miniature ice particles feel on paws. Chill, resilient.

Leaves in the autumn, I still have pictures. We would run and jump, colliding with one another.
I always felt like we were stars in the night sky, orbiting some massive black whole superstructure.
Like brothers, our gravity wound fields between, connecting and flaring our fires brighter.

Do you remember the bonfire in the lowland that summer so long ago? My friends found you beautiful.
I realized through their eyes again, just how much I loved you. Staying up all night with us.
When even we were not so sure that we were awake, or wanted to continue to dance. To burn.
Gin and tonic and the suspended disbelief of believing in something. In the dark.

I should be grateful; we ran together for so long. Even across vast distances, continents of memory.
The air rushing past, the wind with grass scented, the flowers a splash of color in the arms of galaxies.
When I ran beside you, I could feel the earth beneath my feet. And the teeth in my mouth.
I could sense the wholeness of my being in a sunset. And the bright red burning of yours. All a wash
In the glow and background radiation of existence. Of starlight.

My breath comes uneven when I think of it. Your heart stopped, the precious quarks and blood cells
Ceased. The red fire turns grey. Were we ever stars, rushing through galactic lacunae? Pouring our life
Into the world, to watch it flow down mysterious paths, photon torpedoes of running and inaction.
Were we ever more than specks of snow, ice and light crystallized? Into something that believed
Itself to be a burning fire. Only ice within. Did my light ever reach you?

If I am a star, I feel the darkness pulling me. Phantom galaxies approach and I do not move away. If
I am ice, I feel the world emptied of your momentary refraction of light. Your bittersweet. You used
to stay up all hours of the night, growling at my treachery for never going to bed. My guardian, my
friend. And then it became a game, snarling at the shadows of raccoons and nameless things. All
meaning will be emptied. Every field of snow must melt. Each star a singularity transform.

I remember goading you into snow ball fights, pushing you onto sleds. You would
always fall.
And I would play again. But you could not be alone in the white, as though it would
swallow you whole.
Now, the night is much less brighter, the day little more than dew. Perhaps,
whatever
Molecule you’ve become, whatever weight you’ve ceased to make at least,
You will never fear the snow.

Bindings and Bone Marrow

Preface: Don't read this if you're afraid of cheese. I will probably delete it soon cuz it's so cheesy, but I've been dealing with some shit lately that needed me to be fuzzyfeely.

My dad was in the hospital for a week and I didn't have time to cry about it. Not in a whole week. How fucked up is that? He's doing better now. It turns out that he had pneumonia, and that his lymphona is probably causing problems again. This after this summer, when he had a really bad, almost fatal, allergic reaction to his primary medication. You know, the pills keeping his tumors from developing, the ones that were not killing his immune system. Unlike the current treatment he's doing. Which leaves him achy, tired, and sorta sad most days, that some days makes his bones hurt because he has to regrow his bone marrow with pills.

I hate that I am not there with him. I hate that I am writing grant proposals and trying to write papers with theoretical BS because I have to tailor them to particular professors and classes. (For the record, I hate performance studies.) I hate that our medical system makes it difficult for him, that he feels unhuman in the hospital.

Why is it that we modern humans in American have no time to feel? To take care of our families? Why is it that these carcinogens remain in the environment when they are killing one in three of the people we each know in the Midwest? I know the answers. We're too busy. We have to keep in the rat race, keep making money. We have to take care of them by taking care of ourselves. You know what I think would take care of both me and my parents? How about jobs that actually matter, that have job security, that have healthcare, that are actually respectful of their employees? The deeper we get into information tech, the less we respect beings. Knowledge after all, is the be-all, end-all. Or more accurately, the commodity that is knowing stuff.

Or something. I'm testy, I know.

I do not think we should go through our lives without the connections that we each have made before. I do not think that friends should drift apart, as long as they continue to understand each other. I can meet up with so many people from so long ago and still have so much to say. Why drift? Because there's no time.

No time. No time. But there's so much time. We have infinity to live through, the dark masses of anti-matter at the core of our universe and not-so-subtly drifting through space slowly reaching for our tiny planet. We will be consumed, at our most basic molecular being. We will be destroyed. But there's so much time. Our planet is going through the pain of climate change. Of dying, bit by bit, and we seem unable to take action. But there's so much time.

There's each day. Each minute. Each hour. Each month. Each year. Each week. Why do we get trapped in the story that tells us that we cannot do anything about anything? Because it's a story. Which is why I'm in this situation. I need all this BS socio-cultural capital (like knowing what that word means) to reach across the distances, to try to help people understand that the story we tell ourselves everyday is one of millions. We are each living in alternate universes. That is why we drift. We each tell ourselves subtly different stories. And we could tell so many others. There could be so much more time.

But I'm trapped too. Trapped by my desire to have a job, to overcome the problems my father has faced. To not worry about finances. About insurance. About housing. About all the little shit that gets in the way but also makes up the world we live. Not trapped enough not to care, but trapped enough to not escape.

Or is it merely pragmatism? After all, next week is thanksgiving, and going to my parents right now would cause them more pain than not. (they spend so much time trying to make me happy when i visit that it would just be silly) Is it merely the world as it stands? Is it that we are each so small and unable to do anything?

I dunno. I don't know where I'm going with this. Maybe we're all bits of bone marrow in the body of the planet, and we are pushing and pulling, trying to grow and destroy all the other cells, all the plants, animals, and bacteria (according to some scientists, different microscopic organisms make up 2 of 3 main kinds of life, the other being everything else). Maybe we are an infection of reality, morphing it into something that it never was and never can be. Maybe the roots running beneath all this cement will find the air again someday, and we will all be turned to dust.

Or maybe we are each a molecule in this massive solar system, which is a molecule in the galaxy, which is only a molecule in the universe, which is only a molecule in the thing that is larger than that, which is only a molecule to something else, and so on. Maybe we are so small that what we do means nothing. Or maybe we are so small in this deep black void of space and antimatter that what we do is everything. Maybe the spirit that sparks our bodies to life is the reverse of the dark matter, is the anti to the centers of unviverses, is the other force. And our lives are just larger in a different way, in the hug from a friend, in the taste of a cherry in spicy curry, in the sensation of cool white snow on your skin. In the smile of someone you might love, in the taste of chocolate, in the memory of green grass growing beneath your bare feet. In the canoe my father made me once when I was small, in the look on his face when I do something awesome.

Maybe being able to tell my dad that I love him is a big thing. And all this shit I have to trudge through to do the things that I know are important is just the space dust rushing past, revealing my solar system to me as my life forms around the important parts. To reveal our place in the universe was always what I, what we, make of it.

This is a random poem. Also, weird.

I'd say we're through;

it's true that we never saw the leaves
fall. we built a cabin in the woods.
no trees. the dirt caked
mud upon our feet, mingled with our sweat,
left nothing clean. the world was

old. clean. it smelled of wintergreen and
river rushing over waterlogged cedar. the
smell of love. of stars that twinkle
above our roof unseen. at night
i wonder what made you come, what light.

it's true that we never heard the rain
rush. the wood was rotten before we got here.
the grubs and grackles were living here long
before our stars. our sweat and our feet. breath
mingles with the pine-soaked autumn wind. it chills

into a mist. i can see your soul, white hot and
strange. the burning crispness of nature, the stars
in the sky and earth. the earth is not balanced
on tortoises but on many-eyed black birds. shimmering
eyes poised to attack. love was our worm.

now that it's gone, i'd say we're through. it's true
we never heard the beams crack. thunder in the night.
we never felt the rain fall on our skin. still the sky
is open wide. no canopy of lights protects us. no haven
shall hold us. we are ourselves no more.