Day: July 13, 2023

how this workshow this works

this is how this works:
here’s the sky
there’s the sun
bright—don’t look at it
it’s a special star to us, the sun
but no big thing in the big scheme of things
it’s a normal star
a clerk or a waiter
a star that watches the game on sundays
its own day, it takes it off
has a hot brewski

so there’s the sun
it lives in a galaxy
it has billions of neighbors just like it
they all have families just like ours
ours has us
if you—or anyone—puts our pieces
(carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.)
around a sun just like ours
you’re going to get us
or someone very similar

here we are
there’s the sky
it’s night now, so you can see all those other suns
back behind and beyond all those suns, there are more suns
billions of them
and back behind them
there are more galaxies
billions of them
anywhere you look
everywhere you look
billions of them
they all have suns
drinking hot brewskis and watching the game with their families circling around
families just like us
looking up
looking out
looking at all those other suns
everywhere we look
any time, night or day
we look at someone out there looking back

(Copyright 2003, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

the academy caféthe academy café

a young couple, male and female as is
often the case, sat at a table in
the back of the room, eating pizza &
staining a game’s wooden letters with their
pizza-sauced fingertips. they (the young
couple) chattered and clattered their hard-
scrabbled words. up front, arrayed at tables
along plate-glass windows, more couples
nattered in their almost-quiet rustling
way. a man stepped up to the counter to
order a drink, a fancy blended, stirred,
poured out, & sprayed with something pressurized
in a can. a reader in one corner
mumbled home-made poetry into
a broken microphone. this room was once
a martial-arts academy for
women and children. later, there was applause.

(Copyright 2003, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

“Oh! if you cherish life, never disturb the burial place of old letters! And if, perchance, you should, take the contents by the handful, close your eyes that you may not read a word, so that you may not recognize some forgotten handwriting which may plunge you suddenly into a sea of memories; carry these papers to the fire; and when they are in ashes, crush them to an invisible powder, or otherwise you are lost.” – Guy de Maupassant, “Suicides” (trans. McMaster, et al.)