The evening fast approaches, headed home,
Out on a country road that’s new to me;
I see a house and wonder who might live
In such a place, on such a property
And who I’ll never see or ever know.
Our interwoven web of place, milieu —
Where some lines meet awhile, and then part,
While others never touch, but
Almost do
I still remember my grandmother,
Although I saw her, maybe seven times,
Past the age of two.
And maybe she remembered hers,
Or a grandfather,
And so on back.
The quilt of human memory
Is connected, but not
Linear: we remember those
Who remember those others
Who remember those still others.
It has been said
That you die a second time,
The day the last person who remembered you dies.
But I don’t think that’s right,
Because someone still remembers
That person.
We’re connected, but different:
Separated in time, by other connections,
Not directly,
But still —
It’s a beautiful
Crazy
Type
Of connection
“People are just people,” he said to me, “which means every bad thing you can imagine, plus some bad things I’m sure that you and I cannot imagine.”
“Doesn’t being human mean good things, too?”
“People are born, ” he said slowly. “Humans have to be raised.”
“If they are not?” I asked, looking into his tired old face, now half in shadow.
“You get inhumans,” he said.
So what now, can they make of this place?
All is still to do;
Location’s good, they have the space,
No effort they’ll eschew
The dreams of those who try their hand,
Another, average day;
An empty room turned into something,
That’s
The human
Way
(Pronounced ᵻˈkwuːliəs)
Equuleus, that tiny horse of light,
Within an eye scan of Aquarius,
Is visible tonight from in this room
Amid its larger siblings in the sky.
I stand in wondrous silence at the sight,
And look for something poor, a kindred thing
To reconcile with how is that I,
So slight, have come to know how small I am.
The infinitely frigid stretch of space,
And time itself, which we don’t understand,
All congregating here, and through these panes
All our technology seems so much noise.
We pride ourselves, and preen ourselves to shine,
The dimmest flash in all these many lights —
We dine on hubris, feast on vanity,
And strut through mud and slime like royalty.
My friend, the tiny horse, you know my heart:
The small among the great, who’s always there,
And goes without the notice that attends
With having brilliance to the viewing eye —
Let me be one who knows what I don’t know,
May I bring kindness to this life, this ride –
And add my color to the chandelier
Of songs and lights and imperfections lived.
We’re born needing and wanting things
As we grow, we seek the power to get those things
Eventually, we seek the power
Independent of the things it can get us
And in this way,
Money is power
Sexual control is power
Violence is power
And lies are power
And the sickness comes and spreads
Not from what we do to get what we want
But from what we do
After we’ve forgotten everything
We really wanted
Human history’s there to prove
The ways our spirits ever move:
Outward, where they pick more fights –
Inward, where they claim more rights
I had a cup of coffee with
A monster yesterday;
I rather much enjoyed it, she had
Quite a bit to say
I listened to a dinosaur
(Of love instead of scales)
On wisdom that could once be found
In circulating emails
I read of childhood friends, and of
A life become adaptive;
Of where it is we place our hearts,
And how love takes us captive
I read a doctor’s poem, and
A poet’s turn at prose;
I saw a bloody thorn below
A still unbroken rose
And as I come to write again,
I finally realize
That all of us are much the same:
It isn’t tinge, or size,
Or any other earthly thing
We see, where we might zoom in —
It’s sharing our humanity
That makes us truly
Human
