ppm

The air is solid, tickling my throat

As it goes down, like taffy when I chew:

It slides and sticks, the sticking makes it coat,

The coating makes the breathing hard to do.

And I am well; I have no normal trouble;

I waste no time on thinking about air.

Imagine those outside my little bubble,

Who live in normal times in need of care,

And think of how their breath is catching short,

How every intake must become a labor

That as it births still threatens to abort

As each half-lung leans hard upon its neighbor

And threaten to collapse because the smoke

Has turned the air now thick enough to choke.

Altijd

When I consider where my life will go

And how I'll choose to occupy my days,

Some things seem so uncertain, like a haze

Hovers between us, so I cannot know

What I'll be like--or how I ought to grow.

Then all at once, descending like the blaze

Of summer suns, you burn away the grays

And I can bask within your evening's glow.

The future would mean nothing without you.

I don't mean that I couldn't live alone

Or that you have to live your life for me

But that when I consider what I'll do

You give it context; like a crystal grown 

Upon a matrix, you're stability.

250*

It has not been 250 years.

A nation, once declared, must still be won

And that accomplished may still be undone

By ignorance and squabbles, hates and fears.

Once signatures are dry, the task appears:

To make them true--not finish what's begun,

But to begin. The war is still to run,

And then the peace, with its own dangers, nears.

Republics are not nearly automatic:

Perhaps, like watches, they too must be wound.

The declaration--grand, intense, emphatic--

Is nothing on its own but words and sound.

But it can be a horologe's schematic:

The grand ideals are still there to be found.

Awkwardness

Sometimes I do not know what I should say;

And yet I'm sure that I speak anyway.

It's often words I do not quite believe 

Or that some social script suggests to me;

The way you speak to those who need to grieve,

Or those who wish impossibility;

How you converse with people you don't know 

And have no urge or need to meet again

But whose approval you still need, and so

You have to be polite to them, just then.

All sorts of conversations must exist

To make this world keep spinning round and round.

I have to have them. I'll just make a list,

And hope to get through each one safe and sound.

Juneteenth Views

The sky is bluer than the flag below it;

The corn is greener than the cash it brings;

The clouds are decoration, and they know it;

The trees a fringe that to the edges clings.

The vision knit together is a wonder:

A countryside unequalled anywhere.

Let nothing that may come rend it asunder;

Let it remain forever whole and fair.

Yet mankind, who has set forth field and tree,

Will also threaten what has been created;

The corn a battlefield may sometime be,

If violence uncaged be not abated,

And bodies may be buried in the soil 

That once spoke to the beauty of our toil.

Amtrak

I really, really want to take the train.

I can't convey through text how desperately:

It scratches certain itches in my brain

To travel distance locomotively.

I have, in other countries, been transported

Across two hundred miles in two hours;

It was a case of see it, say it, sorted:

Yet here it seems forever past our powers.

We would bemoan the distances we cross

And claim it impossible to better;

Yet history reveals such claims are dross:

Our past did not experience this fetter.

I ask a simple question in this rhyme:

Can we not run a goddamn train on time?

Lilacs

No matter where I am or how I feel

No matter if the day was good or bad;

No matter what experience I had,

Or if the world around me seems unreal;

No matter if the sunlight seems to peel

The surface off my eyelids 'til I'm mad;

Or I conceive myself an undergrad

With hair unwhitened and a spine of steel;

No matter how I age or I decay,

No matter how I joy in my delights;

No matter if I struggle every day

Or wander wondering past wondrous sights,

The smell of lilacs, no matter how mild

Will bring me back to when I was a child.

Void

I do not mind the dark. Why should I? What

About the time of sleep and rest should be

A terror? Instead I find, deep in my gut,

A warmth, promoting my serenity.

I do not mind the light; it too is calm,

Not overheated and not overbright:

A source of joy and gladness, and a balm

To my desire to match day to night.

It is the interchange between the two

That makes the whole of my existence sing;

Neither exclusive, both with work to do:

A constant, intermingled, single thing.

Why should I fear the dark, or light? It's neither

That would be terror. I will live with either.

Cows

Assume, if you are able, that a cow

For every purpose of our calculation

Is spherical. Don't worry about how;

This is no matter for your perspiration.

It's merely an assumption we can make

To ease the calculations we must do;

A cow's a sphere; a ball, a point; a rake,

A line. We take them to be such because

The real truth of the friction and the angles

Is not the point of what this physics does:

Reality to often merely mangles

Pure kinematic truth and certainty:

Let life be perfect, cows live spherically.

All Good Gifts

If everything around us is from God

How can we discriminate between them?

The beautiful, the normal, and the odd

As we have lived, and loved, and seen them

Are equally of God; so is the pain,

The awfulness of every worsening day

That presses like a thunderstorm, the drain

Of walking weary under skies of grey.

If all of it is God's, how can we choose?

A holy favor means a holy fault.

The good we gain; the good we also lose

Collectively define divine gestalt.

And yet this does not mean we cannot tell.

It only means we must turn ill to well.