Up Boy

Up he is, among the peaks and towers and airliners and birds,
a ballooning mind, teetering and spry, leaping, lurching,
high, strung out as wire, conversing with the pushmi-pullyu
of the times, and hollering out equations laced in lies, too
ropey, thinly boned, composed of an avian sweater knitted
by his father who fashioned him a helmet made of toothpicks,
he throws fits, says he had a dream he never had a mother,
that someday or other the Reaper will reap him, stick him
in a glass jar with wasps and blowflies, shake him up,
turn his eyes into petrified wood, undulate out his soul
with an audio wave, dragging him from his sinews and skin,
seizing him with a fuchsia beacon that will beam him up
like Scotty, only sending him to nowhere, sucking void with
no air, blurring his visions of stairwells and roads, homelands
where he cries without a mouth, sheds tears without eyes,
is eclipsed by the nadir of a great spirit awoken by the sound
of his non-beats, slinky-winks himself dead, flame shaped like
his tall skull snuffed, his shadow racing ahead, slipping upon
a slide that is wending into the maw of the dynamo who
taunted his living toes, bent his living fingers, gnarled his
living tongue and broke him down, fed him the drugs of
industry, totalitarianism, conformity, and unconditional love,
he, who is photon grappling a solar sea, bleeding up his
nighttime fears, daily questions, of the dreaded what-ifs,
mayhap-maybes, could’ve beens, should have dones, is he,
why did he go when the mountains called him, he knows,
he knows, he knows he tumbled, but still blames entropy.

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