When I was your age there were two moons and
the world was a desert. There wasn’t a star in the sky
that didn’t scream and the floor off-gassed cold into the glare.
I don’t have to explain it, but I’ll try.
We didn’t have a reason to work, provided with everything
we needed, our governing body a fruiting pandemonium.
The earth devil did its dance on our toe-tips as we slept.
Horizons went wiry, waves modulated and crashing
into the ice wall. Giant pits would open for no reason at all,
at the bottom of each a silver coin that’d turn you to cotton.
Your mother came down from the sky on a chair of lead
and kissed my thumb in greeting. We spent fifteen summers
free climbing down the inverted mountains before you
were conceived, hostile bundled notes scribbled
on the smooth side of stone bark. You grew and grew
and we bound you with threads of wine to keep it all together,
laid the pointed king’s blessing on your squalling shoulders.
We didn’t think everything would get so strange.
Hadn’t really thought of you as a child—a work,
maybe, or an insurance policy.
We’d flip broad-handed through your feelings and pull out the ones
felt too hard to read, too difficult to wrap around. But you clung
to some of them, sprouted legs and hair and stirred the world
into learning how to breathe its own exhaust. When you left
home the green moon broke loose, too, shrinking off
into a bright dot, its light a focused beam of radiant fists, raining.
It was a better time. You have to work for yours,
no beelzebub left to guide you across the burning sand.