If you see everything you need perspective
So I went to live on a thousand foot pole
Got myself a cot with a view
Hard as hell climbing that high tower
Still it’s exhilarating when you get to the top
At first
Like life the weather disappointing
Most days perpetual haze
Winds sway till I feel drunk
For hours I watch shifting mountains
They’re probably clouds
Storms rare but rancid rivers
Steaming streaming torrents of filth
Soaking through my cold old bones
Strange how the view keeps switching
What I thought a city turns to warehouses
A village a half-built golf course
Came here for the sea and still can’t see it
For the last week I’m caged in cloud
My brain itches; I feel watched
By a cloud – isn’t that nuts?
You do feel crazy way up here
It’s worse when the elevator’s out
I’m good with tools but no plumber
They say “the sky above, the mud below”
Wrong like most sayings
Sometimes nothing gets up the pole
So I forget about plumbing
Meditate
Imagine the next leap forward
Better watch your step!
At times I start to sense
Reality’s just holes where we draw outlines
I’m an illusion; the rest’s delusion
Then last month things stopped.
No electricity. No internet.
Even my batteries dead
Time to recognize reality
Wish that goddamn surveillance cloud would leave
Can’t see a damn thing
II Working Cloud
They look up
Don’t see me
I look down
They can’t sense me
I’m a wild beast who
Attacks and crumples air
Sucks vapor and dust
Crosses every peak and sea
Breathes out fog and facts
Reports the most hideous acts
You think your sky is blue?
All’s clear for what I see of you
Every fleck of soot
Each drip of dew
I see it; it’s mine
This world is vast, deep, strong
Creeping and crumpling, leaping and soaring
Its life bursts into space
Covets planets, suns, all of time
And only human deaths count?
So many, many zany species
Spreading from continents and churning cities
I feel them, see them, hear what they say
They tell me
Their work and love of a billion generations
Cannot last
Here’s too much life to die
So we must come and take it
No species has the right to destroy all this
We will pull its leaders away
Carry them off to new-built heavens
There they will live sated and haunted
Sick with regret for their lost world
The joy they destroyed
The tragedy of what they might have become