Dandelions

Alone with but my thoughts at a desk, staring into
the empty page where nothing, no circuits or software
or complex systems, stand between me and putting
my thoughts to paper, crystallizing them on a page.

Pulling the pencil along, the idea of truth takes form
before me, saying nothing of the world at large.

On a deserted island, man and a pencil and a notebook.
Take nothing with you to a prison except a pencil, some paper
(lots of it), and all the memories of birdsong that were unblemished
until they were retrieved from the inside of a coffin.

One day the pencil shall die (as shall I!), but for
now I am an android, connected to wood, the
spear before the sword, the pencil before the pen.

Making no presumption of the reader, except that he
can read this tongue at all, I speak the thought
(by the way, I said “he”—which woman wants to know me?)
aloud through dynamic action on a page, coming
up with a script of my own, fitting everything on a line,
compensating for mistakes with a flourish of the hand.

Took the longer path, but reached the end. Reward: eternity,
for the brief fleeting lifetime that I may come to understand.
Religion is an anathema for the thinking, and that is why
the thinking ought to pray and go to church and take vows.

Will anyone be cruel enough to take an eraser and rub all this
away? If someone wanted to destroy these thoughts,
they’d surely use fire or water. Yet there in my mind is
the image of someone coming with a big pink block (like
the one Theodore had in eighth grade) and start
deleting from these pages. The vanity I have, to
think that paper in this notebook, the tool I have
appropriated from the basement for my newest project,
would be worth saving at all. Will the future
be so precious with these artifacts? The fear
of paralyzing pain has made me afraid of
destroying so-called “value” as defined by
Max and Lisa, swine among heathens.