Published on: 4/8/2011
The Return

I've done my own fading away.
It isn't pretty. You expect to be
Spread ever thinner until you are simply gone -
But there are all the things you leave yet here.
Personal projects, unpaid bills,
Last week's to do list.
Your things grow unkempt. No one
Touches them, their use is forgotten
Or they pass to another user
And their new use is a universe of differences.
The gravity that was you
Ceases and you understand you
Were the glue to so many things,
So many purposes and passions,
So many after thoughts and chances.
Without you the galaxy of you
Dissolves. So you come back.
Older, hardened, but still you.

Nothing recognizes you. All
The constituent pieces even in going
Their own ways, or in themselves being forgotten,
Were not on any level aware
Of going their own ways or of
Forgetting you. You,
The center once of a vortex
Of thought and action and material collection,
Of happenstance and confined randomness.
Gravity needs a satellite.
You start again.

Published on: 4/8/2011
The Invention of Time

Trust me:
We are going to be inevitable.
You won't be able to drive a thousand yards
Without finding some mention of us.
We, and our bigger than life,
Bigger than Arizona or Alaska,
Story. I tell you
There is no way we cannot be famous,
Spread like the good news of wealthy families
Or the infectious incapacity of poor ones.
There will be tales of our shared weathering
Of the whistling arrows, a narrative
In support of, but serially separate from,
Our own: our struggles against
Convention, our thoughts on innovation.
I have not the words
For the excitement yet to be generated,
The wonder to be painted on every convert's face,
The willingness in the popular mind
To know about this, to know about this
More than about the inconvenient desires
Of their own moral children.
I have not the words.
We have a story, a physics
That leads one moment into the next,
All of it without intervention.
One start, many ends. And they
Will believe it, with all their hearts
And the very dullness of their quickening,
They will believe it.
Let me tell it anew.

Published on: 4/8/2011
The Development of Heaven

The first simply was not good enough.
There was nothing wrong with the original plan,
Nor with the execution. Simply
By the time of completion
He had evolved. Other ideas
Crowded out what in the beginning
Seemed to be the perfect counter balance
To a flat brutal earth turned
Into an open air menagerie. By the time
Free will got going really, really well
There were practical reasons
To field a more complicated design.
Not that He had to keep up
With stray earthly developments. He is
The Supreme Being, after all, and it is
His Universe. But He thought
Heaven should be appropriate, not merely
Imposed. So changes - some small,
Some theocratically shattering - followed
Both the events below and His own whims.
Redo the curtains for the Crusades,
Replace the carpet for the Industrial Revolution.
All the work sends down an enormous clatter,
And the place leaks heavenly glow like a sieve.
I don't think it will ever
Be finished. But one day it might be
Abandoned, the gates left open, just about
Anyone wondering in and God
Happy as with the oceans of Mars
To be divinely off on another project.