Time Flies
(after the play by David Ives)
Two restless houseflies
buzz around my living room,
stirring the August heat on this
dog day of a summer afternoon
They land for a moment, then
take off again
Pace up and down the windowpane
tasting for an escape of sunlight
No time to waste
My lover is the type to catch
the spiders and the flies
rather than kill them – one
of the things I love most about him
Whose to say these flies were not
born only hours ago?
Tonight’s moon may be the first
they’ve ever seen – if
they live to see it
And then there’s me: worrying
I should be somewhere else,
doing more
If a day is a lifetime to the fly, I wonder
if a year would feel like eternity
Sometimes it does to me
But then all of a sudden, the last half-
decade has passed when it began just
yesterday
My lover is unbothered by such
existential crises – he loves me
with a fearlessness I envy
I read once that flies’ brains rewire
when they fall in love
to the point that neither can remember
a time when they weren’t together
A familiar lapse of memory I feel
eclipsing my own mind
I wonder if that’s true, if there’s room
for love
in the vicious cycle of feeding and meeting
and mating and breeding and dying
I hope so
To think of all the life I have
wasted already
agonizing over the right way to spend
the rest of it – which hasn’t even
happened yet
While these flies have only today
and each other to love.
Global Climate Strike
Remember this day
Mark it down in the red
ledger of history
As the day the world
came together in one
final call for action
With the fire
licking at our heels
The clock
ticking further passed
the eleventh hour
Gave our leaders
a choice
To pull their hands
out of the honey pot
filled with oil
And wave a white flag
Or continue letting
our raised alarm fall
on deaf ears, turn
their backs, and
let us burn.