Dreamtime

 I dreamt of the ancestors,

my ancestors,

even the ones I didn't know. 

I have done that, sometimes.

But it makes me wonder

because it would--

is this good? 

Because it feels like they

were welcoming me

to that place that we

eventually see

which right this minute shouldn't be

that close for me.

But when I look at this life

and all its attendant harms

a part of me was ready to 

rest in those arms. 

But maybe they were just checking in. 

Because I'm not ready for checking out. 

They are staying with me, though.

No doubt.

The Caged

 What is a bird?

The captive child asked

never having seen the sun,

let alone a creature taking wing

free on the wind,

If a pile of shoes could not

throw you,

nor the device where men

were pressed flat,

the vintage of their arteries

running in grooves on the floor--

let that question haunt you:

"What is a bird?"

And how would you explain

the thousand and one things

he'd never seen in the world,

let alone the things

he had?

A Quickie

 You apologize to the open drawer

you gracelessly hip-checked

and it mutely 

holds no malice.

We anthropomorphize 

haphazardly

with respects to the world

around us--

although we forget to

respect 

other people.

Promises

 Locally observed FTL:

information leaping between synapses

like ingenious fire:

lightning captured in a jar of bone. 

Promises are bestowed on this

canopic shell housing

the one organ the ancients

simply threw away.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

Lift with the mind and the muscle,

flexing youth--

tempting fate.

O mens!

O corpore!

The palace of the mind is a house of cards

atop a badly stacked pile

of chips, and every move

is a gamble 

The problem of physics defies

debugging, and you can't 

fix it with a code

any more than you

can fix mortality

with a gun.