Memory wouldn’t work anymore:
too much war, or school, or new names

Taking up space where our laughter
used to hide-and-seek each other.

And the lighthouse? It remains
beside the ruins of the old house

And then we’re off to the races, and it’s been a long tour in America, year after year of learning to read between the lines of her well-sold dreams — shopping malls! Highways! Cop shows! Liberty and justice for all! — and yet, here suddenly in the eleventh hour some things are revealed anew — PIRANHA PLANT! MUSHROOM! BANANA PEEL! BOO!

When I tell you I cried, I mean
that solanums are the largest genus
in the family Solanacae, the nightshades,
flowering plants both beautiful and dangerous,
as we learn many things are—I am reminded, here,
of the scrawling of a long-gone child,
asking if what is dangerous is evil.

“I tried to uninstall consciousness,” Jim muttered, his eyes flat—rendered without specular mapping, glassy from frame-rate decay. “Didn’t take.” He sounded like someone who had run too many diagnostics on his own mind and found the root directory encrypted by something older than memory.

My cousin calls The Gold
Saucer the in-game casino,
and I think back to the backseat, en route
to Vegas, sandwiched between
her and her brother, my shoulders aching.

All week, the residents anticipate Saturday night, when a dog will play guitar for us. There is no greater celebrity than this dog.

I could not predict how quickly he would
get you by the debt-strings
how quickly he would become your creditor-crush
your beloved bankruptor, your evergreen future foreclosure

We have a future history, Luigi. Last time, I focused on your resilience, because I am
resilient. Is there space for us to discuss futility?

You traded the life we
recovered, your enduring
self, your research, our
home, all for this weeping
dragon left in their stead.

When it comes time to vote some-
one off the ship, I finish my will and tell myself
that space is as good of a coffin as the body
of a tree. That floating through an endless void
used to be my definition of heaven.

Choose, reader, between mind and sword:
Mind grants you beaches, serenity, and vacation anxiety.
Sword, politics and the blood song of football.
Walk the path I shoveled for you, hug
cubes dug from our private
shared earth, and build toward the portal
with an obsidian crown.