Flying Lessons from My Infant

What happens to the dream when the desperation concedes?

You’ve grounded me.

A ma and pa county airfield that I confused for a movie’s mad-dash terminal transfer climax.

Consistently missing my connection,

storming the air control tower,

demanding all desires get re-routed to one destination,

a country with immunity for my golden-lily-white boy indictment.

Now we’re swept away from any crowd, sipping morning coffee and milk, not even self-consciousness watches.

What happens to the dream when the destination recedes?

No sane aviator or civil servant could approve of you at the controls, but we’re up into the strange familiar before we know it

Your giggles are Mahakala

So I eye the emptying fuel gauge as we cross-cut the troposphere with a surrealists’ palette knife,

lift, thrust, drag and drop is eros by any other name.

Will I have enough in the tank to take us home?

You giggle, squeal and push the throttle full,

just because it’s there, just because time is relentless and space is gratuitous.

I feel the plane shutter and groan, propellers flicker into visibility.

Your eyes widen on the horizon

Their only instruction is life more or less

The dream is breathing now and then