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Choose Your Own Adventure

Neces­sity / Tranquility

NECESSITY / TRANQUILITY

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To those whom the gods would undo: they told the truth

Was “gnarled but glow­ing like embers embed­ded in the ground”

How unseen, the old view, how crude and indescribable

The vast bay win­dow cost­ing NASA an arm and a leg

To see what they could see.
Up north there are more dark days

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Than ways through them, a thick skull buck­ling in the cold

Blooded riverbed, a winded depres­sive who’d kill

To pay rent, the indis­crim­i­nate expan­sion of everything

Under the Sun: all become one / who could’ve been

An astro­naut. The unearned won­der, the suc­cor, the loss

*

I’m con­vinced that we were—all of us—fireflies

In pre­vi­ous lives, and while the blue faded the filament

Hung on. But not ‘til we are buried are we bulbs

Redun­dant: don’t think of wings as obso­lete, but nov­elty

Whose roots bloom black and bot­tled messages

*

Read: Save me from myself… To all those the gods

Would burn out: they lent flame, and watched

Panoramic cliques cor­rupt the wicks of trou­bled teens

Da Vinci’s first angel, Descartes’ wax-and-wasp-infested gown

To these del­i­cates, we ded­i­cate: thread­waste, threshold

*

And who do you pro­pose may have pres­sured the free

Object’s fall? Thus mocked the anchor tied tightly

To the anchoress—tossing and turn­ing down the path

To enlight­en­ment: dream your way back through the val­ley

Of the shadow, mind the weather, remem­ber who you are

*

A mytho­log­i­cal fig­ure: come hell or high water, full cir­cle or color,

The hook that would catch your atten­tion, reader—the link

Appear­ing bro­ken” in a chain of events, viz. an out­stretched hand

On the sui­cide bridge—the moral man would serve, he put to words—

A kid again, bear­ing an eraser at the point of no return.

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