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The times were different, he said. Things made sense if you were an insider. Shells cracked predictably along their hinges. The sky was bright and blue and the air singed with cold. Trees were a diary of circles, seasons. New planets were birthing their own moons, dusty and distant. The buzz of byzantine brawls. Flapping famous fathers bringing down the decades like an old book to look through. Voiceless in the winter stiff solitude of mailbox marriages. Commandeering ribbons of missing fission. As if we could power the espionage of elephant hearts, never ever forgetting these incisions, the wailing dreams. The times were different, he said. Allowances were made, strategies stored. The news was heard by radio, static and silence stayed lingering in the air. Biology as a religion, mathematics morphing into art and all the kids pressing buttons until the muscles make pathways well traveled. Doubling up on doubling down, the gambling genes dressing obscene. Coffers emptied into riverbeds. Asleep in reeds and rushes like a baby in a basket. Potential partners playing pretend chutes and ladders, looking for shortcuts. Handmade homemade holograms of memory, the times were different then. Are different now.
