The grays control the world.
Their wisdom and strength the pearl
they present before their tribe.
Wanting to not only survive but thrive.

So many desiring the same territory.
A place where fruits and nuts grow.
A place where water and shade knows
just the right boundaries.

We are all born animal.
Looking to each other to show
us what rules to follow.
What rules can be broken.

What not to eat.
How to hunt the forests deep.
How to defend our own.
Cultivating and grooming friendships.

As we study our closest relatives
Hidden in the rainforest groves.
We find something strangely similar.
They are our brothers not our cousins.

They take more than they need.
They fight and kill as they breed.
They see themselves as the top priority.
Murdering other monkeys for meat.

Killing the mother’s of babies to seek
more and more resources to spread.
To strip the forest bare, to be well fed.
Showing no remorse for their war against tribes.

For one family lives another dies.
Through the great apes maybe we can realize
the human experiment has been compromised
by the seed of greed our ancestors… feed.

They are going to ask where I was.
They are going to wonder why I was not listening.
Why I was not interested.
They are going to remember me
saying, “Daddies don’t play with dolls.
That Daddies only play monster.”

You are going to remember my eyes clouded over.
Searching.
Seeking something not there in front of us.
You are going to remember all the times you repeated yourself.
How often you wanted someone to talk to.
How alone you felt.

I want you to remember me trying to solve problems that were unsolvable.
I want you to remember me trying hard to put myself out there for causes I believe in.
For equality.
For the environment.
For peace.

I want you to remember me trying to be an example for our children to follow.
Through the food I ate.
Through the transportation I took.
Through the words I chose to write.

In the end I will disappear without fear.
Merged with the technology I did seed.
Into the digital grid, knee deep.
All my love and wonder downloaded into a database for you to keep.
A memento of the time we had together.
A guidebook for our children.

I tried to think of the world’s problems as stanzas.
I tried to think of global solutions through prose.
A photo or song merged with words to grow.
To save a moment in time for our children to grasp.
For them to have something to remember, to last.
So that they might think of the future, not the past.

Maybe when that time comes
You can look into your heart and forgive me.
Try and understand that I was searching for you and for them.
That the problems I tried solving will hopefully one day end.
That men will be able to stop their seeking and begin
To live in the moment, when children really need them.

I wear a mask and suit each day to work.
Plastic and chrome.
Black jacket, black tie.

I am one of a billion.
Same suit, same mask.
Nothing new to task.

Back to the future is my home.
Where my beat’s and rhythm’s dance.

Neon eighties bass.
Boom boxed in.
Deep craters of twelve inch speakers.
crammed into hatchback Camaros.
When everyone wore beepers.

Watching the rain drops dance on top
of the car’s cherry red paint job.
Before there was techno.
Before there were elbos
clicking colorless rainbows.

How quickly the future grew from ones and zeroes.

So much progress.
So many precious metals extracted for this.
For laptops and smart phones.
Look… no hands on the wheel.
Driving with impunity on highways of suburban sprawl.
Miss your exit and there is no turning back.

No restrooms for miles and miles.
Entire subdivisions plotted gorged and withdrawn.
Ghost towns of economic downfall.

My mask is not heroic.
It is real and HUMAN.
It signals I am just like you.
A part of the machine we all feed.

Divided to distribute wealth and greed.
For the mortgages we labor.
For the future of our children we favor,
dreaming of a world where masks are not needed.
Where a person’s passions are aggregated.

Once lost, now found.
Once neglected, to become reconnected.

Data beams…

Thymine

Adenine

Guanine

Cytosine

Wrapping

Snaking

Inside

Everything

Living

Learning

Turning

Yearning

Coded

Folded

Futures

of the unknown.

You are as free
as a tree.
No real choice.
No real voice.

What did you want?
The power to do all you desire?
To be a god inside this mortal fire?
To attain control?

There is no free will.
There is no free meal.
There is no free will.
There are no free bills.

It is chaos that controls you.
Churns you and unites you.
With the other.
With one another.

It is freedom that enslaves your mind.
A word that tries to define
the unattainable.
Trying to illustrate the divide.

For you are part of a system
that eats you at its will.
A constant state of entropy
your mind and body feels.

From decay comes all life.
A habit grown from the ground.
Embedded genes made.
Encoded to degrade.

Time is a process.
Time is not a constant.
Chaos is the mother of all order
as the universe grows colder.

A dissipative structure
where order is preserved
far from the equilibrium.
Always eating, always excreting.

Cycling energy through all form.
Form is the ghost in the matter.
Form allows the organism to exist.
Born from this, we twist.

I am that part of you that grows without restraint.
Dividing inside your skull.
Growing as I pull matter together and apart.

I don’t know your name.
I don’t know your words.
I don’t define me.

Like the air.
I blow sublime.
I am a tumor.

I am cancer.
A word with so many connotations.
Having killed so many people.

So many nations.
So many have lain helpless in my path.
I grow because I will it.

Not because of what you ate
or what you did out of spite or hate.
I grow because I can.

I am what you wanted to be.
Your dreams of the future, wild and free.
I am pressure.

The time you think of that is not here.
I am present.
I am all the anxiety you have stored up over me.

Combustible.
You can cut me out but I will grow back.
You can poison me but I will continue to attack.

Your world likes to try and cure me.
I am your blood.  I am  your heart.  I am your brain.
I am all cells free to grow unrestrained.

You and me as we see.
Key deer and iguana.
An alligator or two.
Large Gambian rats
and peacocks too.

A land wild and free.
Settled by man but constantly humbling.
With its beauty.
With its water surrounding.
With its one road running South.
No going around.
No not being on the island
for we are all animals here.

The water is clear and pure.
Cleansed by seaweed and currents global.
Always moving.
Always mobile.
Here you can sit and watch the sunset
as it has for billions of years
and feel small and feel immediately
that this is all there is.

From this nature we have escaped
to air conditioned states of emptiness.
Skin burns unprepared for the energy
the Sun gives without asking.

We feel disconnected
as we sit at out desks and ponder
the future of our lives.
As time continually erupts.
So much technology connecting us
to each other, but detaching us from our mother.

She asks for nothing but to be heard.
Like a conch shell waiting to be blown
her voice is inside each of us.
We know the choices as they are laid bare.
To find a connection, to be here.

Where man is but one part of an infinite puzzle.
Where the ocean sees all.
Where time rises and falls.
Face the power of the ocean’s embrace.
Where all life began.
For time is but an invention of man.