It's that electric hum
In an almost consistent rhythm
Buzzing through the speakers
Of smart phones
And souls
That makes people **** themselves

Because you want so badly
Just to talk
But then comes
That moment
When you realize
The other line
Isn't going to pick up

So you keep waiting there
Listening
To that electric hum
Still begging for an answer

And then maybe
You leave a voice mail
Knowing full well
Nobody will ever
Listen

And then maybe
You call the next week
Or the next day, even
Occasionally convincing yourself
Someone has picked up
Only to be crushed
By the next
Blaring
Ring

A world without love
Sounds at first
Like a dark and terrible place-
Probably because
It would be.

I don't really want
To live in that world.
But sometimes it's nice
To think
That maybe
Somewhere in the universe
On a world without love
No longer having *** with someone-
What we here in the world
Where love exists
Would call
Breaking up-
Would never mean
Loosing your best friend

So cheers to all the aliens
That reproduce on assembly lines
And go home to empty houses
But cheers to us humans too
Because we put up
With the promise of sadness
For the promise of joy
No matter how misguided
That thought process
May be.

Welcome to the
United
States of America

Where a person of a different color
Can be killed
Because he looks at someone
The wrong way
And the courts
Barely raise an eyebrow

Where we can elect
A President George W. Bush
And then have everyone who stole
Those Bush yard signs
In 2000 and 2004
Vote for Bush 2.0
Because his only competition
Is some Massachusetts governor
With a stick pushing
So far up his ***
That he thinks
It's still 1800

Where the Supreme Court says
The age of racial discrimination
Has passed
Just cause we got ourselves
A black president now
That half the country
Wants to see dead
Like that word United
Which America
Thinks it used to be

The sun set
Out my window-
Its light bounced
Off your eye lashes,
Your *******,
And my warm blankets
Into my eyes

I thought I wore nothing but my watch
As we made love
And I saw you checking the time,
Just seeing
How long we had left

But I noticed later that

(“If a train came right now
Would you get out of the way?”
We were in the woods
Standing on this quiet railroad track
Where the birds chirped loudly,
Annoyingly unaware of the silence
We required.
We hadn't spoken
For several minutes
And I had been thinking about this
For a while
As we stood staring straight ahead
Both of us half hoping...

My answer came quickly:
“Yes.”

You turned and walked away
Unable to face
The most fundamental difference
Between us,
Laid out so blatantly.)

I had preemptively worn a moment
That day
As well.

I think it was the water
Coming in
And going out-
Never pausing
Never faltering
Just an endless
And perfect
Procession

Yes,
I believe it was the water
That drew us in.

It was cloudy
That day we took our
Swan dive
That day we made our
Cliff jump
And the waves
Just splashed and roared
Beneath us...
Above us:
Just daring us...

To plummet
Through that icey water;
Abandon
Both our fear of time
And our fear of ourselves

Oh it was certainly the water
That let me find her
And it was certainly the water
That gave her reason
To find me

Of course
It was also the water
That allowed me to betray her
And her to betray me

It was the water
That allowed us
To strip one another's humanity away
And leave each other trapped
Amidst that terribly consistent roaring
Forever

The water is thick
And I realize I’m standing in blood
And I wonder
How I let this happen
How I let this happen
How we let this happen
How can I stop this
I can’t
But I feel like I’m trying
Because I see the lie
I see the red hue in this cloudy water
I see the red blue.

We’ve come so far
From what we used to be
And nobody feels it.
Nobody has felt
The Earth shifting on its axis
The skies falling into the moon.

You can’t look out at all this corn
That’s not feeding you
And talk about the fields and the trees
In terms of order and reason
Because it’s all beyond your control
Even though it looks like
Permanence

It is unsustainable.
And something in the back of your mind
Whispers with society’s breath:
“All the trees will miss you
But will you even remember
To miss the trees?”

“Calm down,” they all say,
“Forget the red hue
Forget the red blue
That’s just water
That’s all we’re swimming through
Forget everything
You ever knew”
Remember that moment?

Do you remember that moment?
When you were a kid?
And you asked where your food came from?
And you were…
Just…
Horrified?
But you got past it.
You got past it of course
Because we all forget;
Because that’s what we’ve been
Allowing ourselves to do
For centuries
And centuries
Of falling into the moon
Which is falling into the sea
Which in fifty years more
Will be higher
Than all New Orleans.

I speak with such a call to action but
I can't make it blue.
I can't remove
The red hue
I know that
I know this
To be true
To be true
To be true
What must
We
Do?

That deepest blue
Cannot come
Just from saying

The word

Green.

I felt the three-dimensionality of space
Independently
From time
And the pull between all things

As the earth goddess spoke to me
In the basement of a girl I used to love
I sat alone just feeling
And imagining complex thought

Not immune from reality
But simply
Independent
Of all that's real and painful and unbearably true

Three dimensions,
Bound inseparably to time,
Closing in