Tell the e-books and the changing climate and the kids in space ships
to go on
without me.
Whip them
up in inside the hurricane of progress.
As the seconds hurl themselves forward
I’ll sit, a sandy lump,
without the wish or the wings to fly into the future.
Let me blow away, grain by grain.
Let me spin off into an incoherent fog
until at last I am reduced to
silence, until nothing
but my most cumbersome parts remain.
My soul, insoluble
like a pebble tossed
across the water, carving everything I ever knew into the vast
liquid
surface.
For the shortest while,
strangers are free
to read the lake’s skin and discover the only wisdom worth throwing forward.

But soon, too soon, all
knowing melts and we
sink, invisible.