Poem of Low Latitudes

Let's crumple calendars, smash watches.

Let's throw ropes around the Moon,
never stop swallowing its linens.

Let's recline the way the horizon does, every evening, yawning across Tropic lines.

Let's fill a hammock with limes.

Let's fall asleep on the reef,
stare up through clear water at trembling stars.

Let's climb a coconut tree & squeal like monkeys.

Let's ride a trade wind like paper airplanes.

Let's watch the sky wheel & wheel
from under straw hats.

Let's count a billion stars,
lose track at a billion minus one, then start over,
until we glitter with white sand.

Let's tumble together until the earth is flat.

Let me sail like Magellan into you,
unfold the maps of your roundness.

Let's hope for the volcano.

Let's reinvent the godless universe ballooning.

Let's crawl into a conch shell
& bang on a bongo.

Let's build a bonfire
that boils away the atmosphere.

Let's sublimate, evaporate, condense.

Let's get drunk on the real stars—
helium engines strumming
our own cores to a glow.

Let me wear your warm skin.

Let's simplify: skin, nerve, synapse, nucleus, hydrogen, quark, the unpronounceable....

~Mike Dockins