Look Up

This is for the kids carving their initials in tree bark The ones who fear the forgetting For the business card givers, the name tag wearers, the ones who quake at anonymity This is for those bored students scratching names into English class desks For the ones who carry sharpies into bathrooms This is for the overpass spray painters, the taggers The “punks” who want something out there to prove they existed at all This is for the ones who fog up cold glass with evanescent images That sixteen seconds later are no more than water vapor This is for the old woman with grey-blue hair waiting for a visitor who’s been gone twelve years This is for the constant tweeter wanting to share the act of consciousness with another If even for a fleeting moment Look up Look at that dome of grey or black or blue or pink that covers us all like a spacesuit Protects us like a night-light This is for the non-stop texter, afraid of her own thoughts that straggle in when it gets quiet Look at the holes of light in the surrounding darkness This is for the ones who carve dark poetry into arms that long for the warmth This is for the song birds whose bursting lungs prove the worth of the woods This is for the boy wearing too much make up wishing to be seen and hidden all at once For the man whose hate blinds him to the beauty in the soul of the world Look up The spinning magnificence should drop jaws and make lungs forget why they inflate at all Look up The pure open blue creates goose bumps and best friends The simple extravagance that dwarfs every worry by its mere existence This is for the rain drops destined for puddles that beg to be jumped in And for the girls who surrender and ruin Sunday best dresses Look up See the spotty grey covers through naked tree branches like looking into a house with soft curtains inside dark window frames Look down See the instruments for creation, the perpetuators of destruction Write your name in the sand Look down to see every wish, dream, desire come to be Each one can be made manifest with these little fractured plates All the forgotten masses Look down to see the fists that pound through boulders to make room for the light Look down at these small power-houses who long to enact those far-off dreams whispered in the depths of cob-webbed hearts Look down at these lovely, messy, shaking tools for mending, mimicking, making, maintaining Worlds of possibility Look And listen because this one’s for you