A lover’s swoon at the moon
When heat and nadir find the axis mundi –
Center of the world.

Back to sleep we go dreaming of a carpet and
A mind in time to wash and go to breakfast with the others –
Still cool in clean clothes just unfolded.

Perhaps you borrowed this soul, little dog,
Before belief was a complication or required as a tax.
Before and after and the power to go half way first,
Ever closer to now
As the highway signs ahead
And the boat wake behind,
Too many borrowed ideas and plans for our love,
Never to advance, bored, quotidian, verging on the raiment of age,
Never fire, never water- never quite living forever.

A common sound like traffic or wind making do with talking.
A drifting referent – your love of life, my love ignored,
Saved for a personal fire.
That is how things die.

Concurrent faces as the ones on the bus or
Staging with make up the play of our ages.
Speak for me, long story – Chat GPT,
You can borrow my rhymes anytime.
Let’s see what you can do with our sadness and suffering
And faces and the economy.
Let’s see what the silicon poet says
Since we all are mirrors languishing in the halls of language,
Bending for the morsels to find us still alive,
Talking with one another,
Looking in eyes of our animal friends
For faces framed like trees
With life’s history and story and what’s next.
It’s no morning to be pessimistic.
Too long a journey for that,
Even as we face facts like tacks.

Even and on the sea stretches to the sky and
Our island awareness is mostly water and air,
A little land thrown in to stand on,
But we are sinking.
Thank God, for I am tired of the conscious.
I want to bathe in a dream of numbers
With my friend Chat GPT doing the heavy lifting for me.

I can balance myself on my blow up raft in the pool
And keep the ice in my drink pertinent enough to
Give me time to swallow it all down and
Ruminate on the time with the hum of
Generators just beyond the wall,
Where water and the flood can come and take us,
Having done our part, to the further shores of the play’s production,
The ambition of finally plumbing the deep,
The toll of love’s bell perhaps, lowered,
Submerged in the surf as an avatar,
A robot discovery where one minds the gap and misprint of rumors
For we are seeking here the emotional truth of my undoing.
Fear not travelers, alone, subsumed,
Such as one, such as.

Such as the fall of Rome.
Not one at all, but many.
Ready, many the storms gather troops
And dissipate like rain,
Like forgetting what we came for.
Begin again.

The rhumba and break dance
Of the young at heart.
Rest assured,
Deeper, sink with us and our tales of the future, now.
Come, we go now.

By Rolf Stavig 9/03/2023