We lust for clean-cut lines.

Nonstop, we believe in their weight—they are the fabric

They uphold our edifices and artifices, sectioning off the sun.

Curves are more excitable, though hardly as lucrative. 

They throw straight lines for a loop. 

Fickle and prone to unfurling, they spiral when you laugh.

We’re so used to a tight rope,

risk is our breakfast and damage our poetry. 

But a flat world stops in mid air.

Straight line on straight line creates a story inside a pattern. 

Anything outside: out of touch and out of line. 

Forever birthing an end, we believe demise is our destiny. 

It’s in our wiring. 

How to resist a drop-off, an ending, followed by blank space? 

 The point of no return, there is a thrill there.

We must have our apocalypse—even at the cost of animals; children; long grasses; great love stories; another place in time.

They say

sustainable is unattainable.

On our sinking ship: better to grab a bucket than write a new rebel story. 

It’s hard to believe in the vastness of ocean some days.

So we hurl toward the inescapable end because it has sex appeal and the too-shiny veneer of forward motion, but there is no give on the body of a bullet.

 A bygone era or two, as seen through a polished rearview mirror

revealing trees-air-water-earth-fire-fire-fire,

once the wild underpinnings of living and dying.

Then, their allure was called romantic, distrust planted.  

Flowering now, like a virus, those seeds of doubt.

We are living beyond our means to an end.

Unlike the straight line, a spiral is continual,

without end,

traveling deeper than a simple circle.

In our upward spiral story, every rung

is a repeat

revolution. 

Each time around, the lessons deepen. 

Every curve is linked to the one before it 

and to all future revolutions 

of travelers 

around the sun.  

It’s time to lay bare the crushing violence of exponential growth,

the line that scrapes the sky.

Wear your heart on your sleeve and grieve

lives lost,

knowledge as obstacle,

the world as we know it.

True loving across the lines is how we make change for all,

beyond bit coins in a cup.

Radical means rooted, so doing groundwork means tilling the soil.

Imagine a natural system that does not compute capital.

There is boundless potential for rebel stories of renewal,

and natural systems we can live with

on the gleaming motherboard of our wildest dreams. 

Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

*Modified from "Bedfellows," an initial version written for a collaboration with visual artist Frances Mackenzie.