The Forgetting

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Everything comes in good time,

            and time is money,

            so does good time cost more?

You pay

upfront for your toxic asset

that will always depreciate

with time.

 That good time,

you bought.

The clock is ticking,

            every second counts,

            and you have a minute to win it.

                                                61 seconds later,

                                                everything is lost.

The Bellgod rings,

            all the men in colored jackets,

            scream, and moan,

            and wave little bits of paper in the air,

but none of us can ever pay enough to take

                                                stock

                                                of our souls.

And if,

if you divide my life by zero,

            all you get is

                                                a syntax error.

The old astronomers said space was composed

            of interlocking spheres,

            That’s proof! they said,

            that the universe was whole,

                                                and beautiful,

                                                and striving.

Perfect, even!

            and boy,  they said, we are smack-dab at the center

                                                of all that striving perfection.

But we soon learned it was all a fallacy.

            The universe was warped and confusing.

Made of more dark than light.

                                                Like us.

                                                Or so we thought.

We had forgotten the miracle.

            We lost God, gods, and ourselves in all that dark.

We made a new god,

built an idol,

wrought in money, blood, and science.                                   

The chemist heated the world,

            over a Bunsen burner.

            He exclaimed, that’s simple enough,

                                                no reason to be frightened,

                                                no reason to believe,

                                                it’s only a bunch of particles.

The scientist hunched and muttering,

            uncovered his theorem,

            cracked nature’s code,

            and he sold it to Exxon-Mobile, Monsanto, and marching armies.

And now we delineate, and extrapolate,

and regulate, and automate.

We derive, and divide, and subtract,

            and we find,

            where the hell in all this calculus

                                                Am I?

But if,

if we can remember those first ponds where we swam

before the light of stars even touched our eyes,

where time was only a single drumbeat.

 

If we can remember the sun that flooded our eyes,

when the bare soles of our feet pushed into the earth,

and we felt the earth push back.

 

If we can remember how to raise our arms,

like the limbs of trees, not out of despair,

but for gratitude and wonder, with palms open.

 

If we can cease our forgetting,

we might yet illuminate the dark.

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