To walk the construction of spoken thought,
the assumption of sentience
for presuming infinity
despite our measure of time
by Earth’s rotation round itself and the sun
instead of a galaxy’s turn
or the expansion of the universe.
Instead of the passage of unfulfilled desire
and half-remembered dream—
a hill mynah’s death-notes
tuned toward older cloudscapes
back to the first song it learned,
the ancestral memory of an asteroid
and the lost hope that it not fall to Earth,
every wingbeat a flight
from the echo of its impact,
from the rat-faced creatures
that later nested in its crater—
the hypostasis of conflicting forms,
no more a parent’s ridicule
than a child’s scorn.
– 09/14/2022
Carlos Valentin III is a member of Pima Meeting in Tucson, Arizona (IMYM).