Meet Me Nowhere

I am quite sure you are not out there, now

How could you be? This is not a real home

It is a rather sordid waystation

Between oblivions

The audacity of your red hat, alone

Confirms that yours is an alien mind

A strange visitor from past or future

When things were, or will be, more hospitable

To those who stroll through the silly swarm thinking

You don't have to do it this way if you don't want to, you know?

Humans have been being long enough to develop a repertoire

A myriad of modes and styles and characters and costumes

This could be a Grand Duchy, or a remote temple, or a brothel

We could all use salt as a currency, yearning for the processed foods

That our remote offspring will spurn as one would a rabid animal

Or we could find ourselves subsisting on lab grown protein in a pod

You are not of this ugly, greedy, slothful, fearful, vengeful, post-literate age

You linger over passages in novels you were scolded to avoid

You could have reunited your parents, but did not, for their sake

You laugh quietly to yourself in crowded, awkward places for sport

You do and say the odd thing, the provocative thing, the dangerous thing

You never pretend when you are telling the truth

You made me grateful to have any body at all

You do not reach for a device when I ask you a question

You are alive

You know it, and you want to find out how

To do it your own way, beautifully

No one can defy the power of your red hat

They ought to tremble like suppliants at the altar of a pagan goddess

Fickle, enigmatic, quick to wrath

If you stand outside the world and think of ways to represent it

In sculpture or in music or in pigment on canvas; even words will do

You come to see how much of that reality is pure fiction

Made up as billions have been going along

You are no character in someone else's story

Narrator/protagonist was your nickname in High School

I do not even wish to be a character beside you

I want to go on reading, while you write the world right

With your crimson crown

Let us meet nowhere

Where we will both feel at home

Where you can tell me things that you wish were understood

More widely, because once you really understand them

You cannot be a mere user anymore

You are not reducible to your relationship with things

The red hat knows this

Look how quiet and well behaved it is

You think and think about what you are thinking

And then think about making art out of that thought

A more powerful aphrodisiac does not exist

You are not alive

There is only room for one member of your party

For you are always everywhere and nowhere

Studying every onlooker and no one

Finding all the reasons to continue to wear a red hat

Reclaiming it as a symbol of thoughtful defiance

To scorn the motley multitude and their mediocrity

Bludgeoning popularity with solidarity

How tangible, how comfortable, you make nowhere seem

Wait there

I will always, never arrive