Why are we only of the earth, Grandpa?
See your knees sunken in muck,
the sun sketching every plane of you.

You balance a new potato in your palm,
ask me to decide if we dig now or let 
them stay buried to toughen up.

Even before us, they plowed fields
and sewed leather onto soles, their lives
spun from the loom beneath them.

We could puff into the blue like clouds. 
Why hasn’t one of us learned to fly?
What keeps us pointed downward?

Your mother dug in her heels to birth
you in the house her father built 
on fertile city land he saved for.

Did you ever yearn to fly, Grandpa?
Can you buy sky the way you sink
into the dirt you were born in?

Where do you hoist a flag or hold
still to hug your grandchildren?
How could I be that free?
                        

Think of him as the ice she slid on
  to the center of the world
And the worldly air she projected
  during games of deep concentration.
Think of him as buried deep inside
  with a heart covered only by membrane
And the hat that slips between us and God
  to cover our sins and wisecracking.
Think of him as the crack in the counter
  we fill with goo and cure with heat.
Think of him as the heat that fries our skin
  in the two-week cure for wintry blues
And the apple-cured bacon we overcook,
  crumble, and add to everything we eat.
He’s the addition to everything she is
  and the frosty fire pink of her fine eye.                         

Someday you will realize it was me
and know what you’ve lost.
When the cancer cure is announced,
I will be the anonymous healer.
I will defeat A.I. before it takes over
our world, outwit the hackers, 
the scammers and spammers.
You will realize I designed a safe
airbag, cultivated thirty new flavors
of raspberry and pineapple, let
lima beans go extinct. That I wrote
a wildly successful Christmas song.
Like the boy seeing the emperor,
I exposed big lies with one push
of the button, but kept the little ones;
only I knew the difference.
You can thank me for solving
what was known as the gun problem.
We’re all safe in the future because
of what I’ve done, outlawing grief
and its wily predecessor love.