We will eat boysenberries plump on dying vines in our free time
and listen to harmonicas beneath freeway overpasses hum
like wind chime rhymes. We will graffiti property thefts and
mural slave halls in fresco as the engines of monolithic design
shear our breath into labored pain, as the factory smokestacks
choke us with their ashen refrain, as the missiles screech like eagles
inside this cage of blue. We will sell our speech for new
rose petals, we will drink the river meshed by pollution's
fetters, and we will reach a tower where the sun tells the
hour if only to celebrate heaven while we painfully age.

We will be excused from lectures once we have had too much
to think. We will send in papers scrawled with hieroglyphic
letters and call professors late at night to inform them that
ideology too wears argyle sweaters and speaks in structured
diagrams of chalk safe from the weather unfurled like
a flood behind our kitchen door. At night we will read
the charts of the stars and ask to be lead through the
waters rising above parked cars into a home softly free
and floating like our hearts.

We will forget how to speak as the television informs
us of a thrilling new disease, when the radio names war
by failing to list any recent casualties, when the papers
bleed in blackened ink we're still able to read like
the price of gasoline versus the cost of our destructive
machine that we decided to lease from an institution
charging us hidden fees, well you know in the end
you just do it to make amends and not to think about
permutations that could have been.