Poem: Unsettled

 

Unsettled

 

the dust had no color,

the lost dreams of stones.

in every corner of the room,

where absence thronged thick,

the proof of its nothing 

lounged to look back 

without a care,

no style, nothing,

a stupid kind of trouble, 

unaware of its own desuetude.

a negative optimal, highly inert,

and yet still, somehow, 

it crept.

 

everyone, in fact, was in there,

a whole ogle of eyebrows,

a wide audience of furrowed fuzz,

from the heroic to the despicable 

and the lewd.

there were many ancestral verdicts,

 a not-quite microscopic 

jackstraw puzzle of interlocked victories 

and failures.

 

i could make them dance with a single breath,

a fury of sashays.  unkempt tarantellas.  

afterwards to settle again,

nondescript and shrunken,

the opposite of dinosaur bones.

 the dust,

it carried the Primal Fetus in its eddies.

it had snipped a flagellum 

off the very first protozoan

only to stuff it 

into its shifting roam.

 

when lava cooled,

when the last flames sunk,

when nucleic helices 

swam pregnable waters,

the dust started to nibble.

it was, even back then, venturesome,

both opportunistic and avaricious,

multiplying its heads.

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