Aria I

seven

seven point zero zero zero point zero zero zero point zero zero zero

woah 

that's a lot of stories.
that's a lot of heads.
too many to count, too many to find.
that's a lot of heart and a lot of love.
so much sadness and...
drugs.

That's 7 billion, 7000 million; more than yesterday, if you're keeping track.
more, less, more.
There's you and there's me and we're family...
but there's him and there's her and their daughter and the nephew and the art teacher and my mom and my dad and the moon and the stars and

woah 

I met a man once.  He had an arm and no legs.  His wife left him and his kids are dead.  He asked me, “want to hear a joke?”
I laughed.  

12 billion, 324 million, 791 thousand, 2 hundred and 80. jokes. in the world.
nah.
I didn’t count - maybe more, maybe less - does it matter?  I don’t have to time to share them all for you,
to see if a little laugh escapes like the last days of summer
when we’re young and free
and in love

Some jokes are gonna grow old and wise, steal attention, make friends.  Others end up old and stale like cardboard or veggie bacon or refrigerated bread-
unused, not found, not rejected or accepted or connected or respected,
not in mind, not in sight,
but that doesn’t make it right and they don’t go down without a fight
but they’re battered and bruised, hiding wounds traced by shards of glass while they were
rammed down with slabs of cracked concrete.

All these jokes you and I don’t tell?
One of them is my grandpa, gasping for breath as cancer snatches him, filling the room with the smell of sadness
as we start to crumble and it’s all me and you and no words and there’s one tear and then two and then an ocean.
But we’re not just pining for him:
we’re fearing for us,
for that one dia de los muertos when the name etched into the weathered tombstone is mine
and the kids run to their familia
right over the grave of my happiness.

Their little shoes pound the dirt, pack it closer as they push my dreams down deep.  My dreams that were once my life cradle the body that once held my dreams.  Dreams of idiosyncrasy, philosophy, democracy. The dreams of the people that my eyes once beheld.  Dreams that should have died with the poor fools who dared believe they could make a difference, dreams archaic and decaying, beaconing brightly in our future after rising from the boneyard like a phoenix in the dark when the moon has finally given up on us and all we see is black.

Twenty years from now, tomorrow, yesterday, my dreams etched across the sky.  
Proud, fluid, open, all that is left of me,
a testament to my veridity.  
My brother’s dead,
my wife’s gone,
my friends were old fifty damn years ago.  
Me?
My body’s been burned and eaten by mycelium and I’m still hoping I’m alive.  I was dead, deader than the mountains and the valleys, those unorganic wonders that preach, before I even took my first breath.
I was dead while I was alive and I was dead when I died but better to have breathed and spoken
and lived to see my life broken
than to have never danced with the whites of your eyes and the touch of your speech.

Tinted
sadness
when I remember the laugh and the giggle but forget the name.  I’m murdering in cold blood all the people I don’t want to work to revive.  I swear: I’m not paralogizing, I’m just fraternizing
with the ghosts of my past
and the recollection of my future.

I cry for those who have mouths but never learned how to speak, for the artists with inspiration but no brush. The pain calls them slowly, with poison, but it’s natural and they’re falling and they’re dead and they’re forgotten.  The chalk is washed away, the colors drain like a tornado and you know they’re not ever coming back.


And they’re gone.