Tomorrow is a Making Day

Your happiness lives because you have walls.

And not solid walls, neither stone nor clay nor wood,

But something like glass, transparent,

Maybe cracking in a couple places,

Or slightly open in a room you’d forgotten existed

So a draught comes through and stirs up the air now and again,

Saturates the over-oxygenated environment of your waking reality

With a little arsenic that still hangs in the air

From the tailings across the water.

Silly scares in basement freezers,

And bypass difficult weather with clever zeugma,

Make me laugh at my unbidden rêverie

And watch my face grow still.

What is a summer camp to us?

Here, where the evergreens cloak themselves in white

While these temporary souls slumber in other worlds

And we drift like ghosts six feet above the ground?

What do we do when they play their music around their fires

And send their children chasing after the squirrels,

While the faun behind cabin seven cries out

To feed the bear, and its mother looks on?

But my friend can play into the joke,

Bring laughter to your seasonal clambering,

And know in some other less-maintained section of their mind

That it is a wound that hasn’t yet been made.

We trace our scars before their genesis,

Welcome them in with a smile and a nod to the wind at the edge of town,

And we ask for thunder to come rolling down the valley,

Because, God! it’s too hot, and the days too uniform.

I feel like a child,

Not trusting in the strength of the windows

While the storm rages just beyond.

Yet I know it is not without sense,

For the glass is not glass,

But a visage of Time,

And my body a vehicle that passes through.

This is not a room separate from the world,

But a single perspective, and all our walls

Are portals to worlds upon worlds

That have passed before or follow after—

Tell me, tell me to turn away,

And I’ll fall backwards over my shoelaces,

Into the—into the—into another room,

Surrounded by other walls,

And you’ll be on the other side of the glass.

But tomorrow is a making day--

Making art, making stories, making love.

And for now, our hands can still touch,

Our laughter can still be heard,

And the windows, though lined with cracks,

Remain intact, while the storms beyond rage and retire,

And rage again.