Don’t Give Up on November

1.
Already the science reversed.
Like all progress, we justify the consequences.
The new roof after the hailstorm
will not be new for long. It will be better
when none of us work
to live.

2.
When I roamed the indoor botanical garden
everything was beautiful and trapped.
Orange birds like lanterns
on transcontinental flights. Seeing is the sun
stuck in a revolving door. On a good day,
it’s the clouds.

3.
Pretend you have unlimited access to all the world’s resources. Pretend we all do, equally. Leave
the tap open and it will run and run, pooling
with the scraps in the dishes. One million made-up faces at your disposal. Corroded cast iron clogged
like a fist in the throat.

4.
In a search bar, type whatever you can
possibly imagine. No more waiting
in the wide frontier of the future.
Somewhere, a carbon-offset forest neutralizes
a sea of microplastics. In museums, rainbow oil slicks replace watercolors and mirrors.

5.
I can do this all day, says streams of sulphur
leaching into the soil.

6.
Of course we never had a golden age
of anything. Humanity is the scribble
in the margins of a masterpiece. The exercise
before the breakthrough. The wave lurching like
fingers closing into a fist, opening suddenly to
scrape anything that might be pearl
back into its grasp. Hoarders of shining things.

7.
Called snowdrops, one beacon of spring
bows its head like a bell expelling its last cold timbre.
Green hinge, and the season finally melting. The
beginning of one often resembles the end of another.

8.
Nothing is or ever has been original.
Copies of copies of roots surge beneath us,
buzzing with sugar, splaying like split thread
to make the most of what it’s been given. Like
this, we return again and again
to the surface.