Peel back my eyes
and touch the still-healing wound
oozing cerebral fluid from the Big Bang.
It’s in this blind space of raw pain
I often dwell.
Words are pails we use to scoop the insensate flames,
to continue our sole, great project: perfecting the footpath,
protecting it from entropy, from one another, from ourselves.
“How does one with no boots
pull himself up by his bootstraps?”
“Why teach someone to fish
then deny them access to the lake?”
I just read that the virus is mutating, anti-vaxxers are joining other unsavory elements to protest public health measures, the president doesn’t see the need for mass testing but is now getting tested daily…
Do I turn out the light?
What remains for me
before the clock strikes hard?
¿Apago la luz?
¿Qué me queda antes de que
el reloj marque duro?
Cada noche me subo a mi tejado solitario
para maravillarme de lo no dicho,
y sé que también estás mirando hacia arriba, que la
leche fresca que vierte de la oscuridad
también te apacigua a ti.
I have lingered too long on the intricacies of bark and root,
of trees as leap into the inverted bowl of a sky I cannot lick,
named comets and coined mythologies while the masters
of commerce discussed business in the other room.
I asked the earth for forgiveness, but she was silent.
She could not fathom what I’d done to her or for her:
What can she know of my carbon footprint?
It is late-April 2003 and I’m well enough to bathe. Mom draws
the bath, peels off clothes and bandages. A month of sweat and blood
disappears in eddies of soap and steam. Civilians cower in fear—
Humankind sets the price of the earth—
What is the value of things buried deep within?
I would extract a fortune out of dust,
I would mine the sky for diamonds and the soil for moons,