Sunrise in Detroit

Peach morning,
the light embedded in all others
has dissolved to my own darkness,
I am no longer what I am not.

The toddler giggles, cries, lets out a big, bad catarrh
and puts words to every disturbance on her flight.
Her mother looks for me with eyes of evil or love;
another opportunity to change my life
as we fly through Memphis and St. Paul,
places to settle, or merely touch,
all that they are is inside of me, waiting
to be freed, as I always am free,
as we all always, inside, are free
in our dreams of freedom.

What do we want, running away, in our minds, from our lives?
We want it all, we say, to know that we are all we are already,
we look to sun-drenched cherubs, and almond eyes,
and signs in people they are larger in this world
between excursions to our laptops and our books;
like the refractions from clouds streak the cabin with light
there's no stuff in us, but dreaming the dreams of others,
as clouds become mountains, the sky a sea to somewhere.

The seat belt sign goes off, the attendants wheel the trays
like they believe in service. It's a story that they stick to,
in their flight suits, of a heroic continuum
from the days of Lindy and Hughes, and tales of salad to coffee
on commuter flights, and thoughts, while trays are fitted
to modules, of the freedom travel affords.
A businessman pushes email weight around
as I put myself in the heads of others
who walk through their duties with hope and purpose,
who collect, with immaculate kindness, the trash.

It's what's we do when Gods come down to us as babies,
we serve them like they're gurus teaching truth
with wicked laughs and drooling gums and eyes that see past lies
to joys they never let you view, interrupted, as we are,
by constant necessities, to fill them up and clean them off
while their souls play somewhere farther away.

Perhaps in Hollywood, or on gridiron mud
we play together, free, in our visions, of constraints,
and we gain back the glory we gave away,
what we never really had
except as thought, or more exactly, potential.
We subdivide all that is, and call it preference,
chasing what we want through what is not
like painters who can see inside a vista for what should be,
some fragment of remembered dream, that seems
so unreachable, as all we hoped for falls away
and we want only to be warm so we can keep on dreaming.

Like mothers' eyes pulling something of themselves away,
the plane learns something of itself as it lands, a silver morning,
the world is waiting outside the cabin, for us to find our voices
in others' faces, which hide an endlessness we cannot shake.