What do you mean
we could have been counting the
thousand pinpoint pricks of black mustard seeds
on the mandalas
instead of sitting in these swivel chairs?
I’d gladly have given up my
climate controlled fifth-floor apartment
to be a goatherd in the mountains, if
someone had only told me sooner.
There must be a million
glass elevators to the top of these
corporate-named skyscrapers,
but just outside the orange glow
I have found a night sky that throbs with blackness.
All this time I have been entering numbers into cellblocks,
and you let me know so
late in this game about these worlds
where I’ll never go.