Asleep With Darwin

I am asleep in Darwin
clawing at outer space.

I never lost a step. I followed
his eyes along Galapagos
rocks where the earth began.
My brain ravages bare lion face
of the terraform. Mars is my suitable
warrior body, slain of course,
and by the heel dragged to the edge
of fermented oceans drawn from
usual occupation and distress. My ashes
are strewn on Mars in the year 2131.
(How else can fame be measured?)


I grind into that sediment. I bleed
when the frozen water expands and
I step back, softer, but my mind does
not rust. I travel. I will travel. I have
reached where that imperceptible
folio, Shakespeare’s presence, was
marked down as notes for future fugue.

Can I influence what some call
“the global properties” of planets?

When I was a lad, I studied chemistry --
that word properties seemed dead.
How do we know the last meaning?
When do words invert and spatter
when blown apart by the greater
weapons we proclaim as privilege.

I grow. My body dies. I am all minds.
My wit tangles and wins, and my lance
shifts with the will of a hurricane
a brush stroke of cerulean blue edged
with vermillion to signal life again
without bones or hands while the soul
willful, resists the metamorphosis.