The Fallacy of an Absolute Future

The greatest use of life is to spend it for
something that will outlast it. -- William James

I untie the sky and pull out dirt that is lost --
It thunders through the tornadoes, which we
do not understand at all. Why are we missing?

We spend reason to discovery that logical gun,
science – it is fact and fallacy. One postulate fixes
it to the skin and then the next replaces
the secondary soft belly of ideas hidden
by some unknown famous dreamer.

We cannot give her a name. Will we outlast her
we tell ourselves as we plot success and answers
will be closed before they are opened?

Plans screw into black wood fires
of the forest where the yell and howl are base
and treble to my unknown Mozart -- no, action
will strip air from broken Terra. It will shout
when we take deeper breaths; we do it twice,
three times, and carry our cannula with us
as bottles of rare gases to flood our lungs
to keep us open for every game we make up.

We cannot stand boredom. How can we?

I am not making light of false history, science or
the partial ladders we mark down on long charts to
count the molecules to draw and encrypt them
in three four seven nine dimensions playing them
like soldiers of planets to revolve oblong and
skewed in another temporal passage, one we miss
forever as we jump off the ledge of the tunnel.

I walked with players. I breathe through empty
hollow tubes until the arms of the sky taunt my bed.
I climb again with replenished energy, and the negative
was true and dangerous as ideals that cannot focus,
and when they do, the surface is too hard for return.

We are calm and enriched as we slow and leave
the Kentucky wilderness. Stravinsky shrieked
dissonance though halts measured as steps planned,
and when they don’t go forward at once, I was lost
in that negative entropy where disorder becomes
order into a predicted obvious noxious pattern
cursed, repetitive and not the usual step humdrum
that generations slam into pockets for chump
change to pay dues for space -- we will not exist.

I do not repent and I dangle from a hot air balloon.
I jump for the ribbons. I almost catch them before
the sky withdraws as the particles of bone,
and even the last tooth, final spine
excavated from some future tense, an
uncharted habitat we imagine they want
with the fossils of our remains. They dig
furiously as their musicians play our Stravinsky,
Gillespie, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard.

Stravinsky called out his dissonance when I watched
the end of love pass down the street until I fell
asleep at the end of the river. Water was lost.
I am no longer mass where nothing exists,
not even a small beach, or a man/woman
with hands out can pull me inside where
I step into several pasts and futures,
to the dirt road and all the tornadoes
that slip across the desert where we
swim into the dust to arrive before I start.

Startled, my hands tremble.
I begin the other ways hope
raced out of Pandora’s Box
and into my mouth --
my lover takes it all back
from me to repeat blank
skies and storms beyond
any predictable norm.

4/11/06