Posts for June 2, 2026 (page 19)

It is just after midnight and I am worried for tomorrow.

Not a Sunday Scaries worry that can be blown away with slow breaths. Nor the bone deep ache of an anxiety cured by little pink pharmecuticals. But the belly burning certainty of a worry which comes from knowing exactly what is happening. And what is going to happen next. 

The birds of the air share their skies with drones designed to destroy,
the lillies of the field shrivel and die before they can spread sweet pollen,
the grass of the field is dead today, tomorrow, forever if we let it. 
The hunger of swelling bellies, the thirst of cracked throats, 
enforced scarcity and the rising stock price of human suffering.

I am worried for tomorrow. But it is after midnight and tomorrow is here. 
There is no Deus Ex coming to Machina this mess of laissez-faire murder, this nest of VR vipers.

It is after midnight and tomorrow is here. I am worried. 

                                                                                             Scientists have found new but tentative
                                                                                             evidence that a faraway world orbiting
                                                                                             another star may be home to life. 
                                                                                                                               – BBC news report

Warm interstellar oceans
cover the sub-Neptune
crust, cradling microbes,
rocking their watery crib.

Our rumored cousins are
eons away as our machine
stops, so Forster wrote;
even that won’t prevent the

coming of more microbes,
the higher power allowing
something new to do what
we older ones could not.

Though we left the gallows
of Nuremberg years ago
in books and nooks of
archives and classrooms,

we are Munch’s nameless
man screaming from his
bridge. We are Sumy and
Bucha, where blue and gold

flags dip low. We are men
in boxers made to bow
before the death of
due process. Democracy

was a fantasy, now truth
is born from the loudest
mic, and you too will
soon be rendered moot.

Such is the DNA of microbes
in warm oceans; mutations
lurking in the murky mud, our
last universal chance is found.

Saturday night at the kitchen table
We rolled the Yatzee dice to the tunes of Wheel of Fortune and Hee-Haw.
Vannah and Minnie Pearl’s “HOW-DEEEE!”, ageless even after a long week.
Conversations of cows and corn, beans ready to pick and can. 
Tomorrow would come early, and I had no idea then how quickly yesterday would be gone.
But that night, the smell of tobacco, sunshine and soap-clean rolled me into bed when the TV went quiet.

(A poem after Dejan Stojanovic)

A poet once said, 
“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.” And I believe him. 

For the leaf teaches me how to spell its green name
with fine-veined ink in patterns like letters
formed by the hand of a small child learning 
to read a book whose pages bud, bloom, flower, fall.   

The river dares me to whistle and scream and laugh and drink
deep, hungry gulps until I can hold no more and no less
than the pulsing heart of all that is drawn back to the sea,
spilling past the edge of the horizon to fill what needs to be filled.  

 The sky shows me love can hold its wobbling orbits
even in the icy dark, even in collapse
galaxies burn bright enough to send kisses of light across eons
to reunite stardust with stardust

And I learn to sound out their language
in the ancient phonetics of awe,
of wonder   

-until I shimmer     
as they shimmer-                       

-until I shimmer as they shimmer-                               
leaf, river, sky                          
     leaf, river, sky                                 
          leaf, river, sky

Rain beats steadily from grey skies.
Hundreds of soggy catalpa blossoms fall.
Outside my window, the magnolia births
bud after bud.      Inside, ripe                    
nectarines make love in every room.

The flat of a mirror is beveled,
where I slid off the edge,
light bending backwards
and forcing choices, my head turned
to look for the three
    –  you and me and she.

I was a bevel of light from the looking glass. 
I was Alice floating like cotton candy
and laced with cinnamon hearts. 
I held tight while 
she and thee stuck your tongues out,
catching strands of pastel sugar
spun in funhouse booths.
She and we were sweet in youth
before touching the edge
of every last word she said.

Here you come again, LexPoMo,
calling my non-poet voice
to reach deep down and fake it. 

Here you come again
and I hear Dolly’s sweet trill 
turn into a cheerful ear worm
made more cheerful still by reminding me
of my friend Marianne, an actual poet, 
who saw Dolly before she was famous
and has video to prove it. 

I love that story.

So here I go.