I want to meet the universe in the morning as it is,
without advertisements, without Amazon, Facebook and Google
saying “Olivia” as if they have known me all along,
without any recommendations as to sleeping, what food to eat,
how to exercise, hydration, what to buy. Without Zoom flattening the subtleties,
sucking away our ability to sense the energy of someone else.
I don’t want to hear the breaking news, shoved at me, reminding me constantly
of the cruelty that now passes for government, and even justice.
I want to meet the universe in the morning as it is,
the setting moon, the orbiting earth, the sun rising,
the universes beyond the Milky Way,
the vastness of the dark and the hidden
distant stars that shine despite no longer being there.
All that we cannot see, the enormity of space and time.
I want to meet the universe in the morning as it is,
both the infinite and the infinitesimal,
all way beyond what our senses can perceive,
the enormity of an atom with its own orbits, spinning around
a vast nucleus, and with its own vast empty spaces.
How is it that an atom can contain so much emptiness:
how can the insubstantial add up to substance? All that dizzy
energy capable of blowing up a world if we smash just one.
I want to meet the universe in the morning as it is.
The universe of time as well as space.
Earth time, days, seasons, years, for sure,
but also time since our beginning, all that have lived since the beginning of life,
the long genealogy evolving from a yeast cell into every creature that exists.
And the time way back, before that one yeast cell, how long was that?
Not to mention all the years continuing forward from now to who knows how long?
Longer for some animals than others as we know,
as we too may join those stopped in their tracks by extinction,
but the energy still evolving, creeping endlessly forward.
I want to meet the universe in the morning as it is.
Leave the rest to the afternoon, the junk of modern life.
Plastic gathering in the ocean is terrible enough but it also represents the state of my mind.
All that garbage sending me to an inner place where I can not remember a life
Unshadowed by the traces of innumerable ads,
those corpses of modern capitalism working on me
way beyond the moment when I read, hear, or see them,
digging into the ocean of my mind, my own sea of life.
What a thief of consciousness,
intelligence now named artificial,
warping our own precious minds.
Our awareness waylaid, bruised and abandoned,
by a thief waiting in a different sort or darkness,
sabotaging my sense of a mystery that I can now only
find in bits and pieces scattered on the floor.
Give me length beyond a beginning and an ending.
Give me infinite and infinitesimal extent.
I want to meet the universe in the morning as it is.