Life on Mars

His walk to college at times would cross the path of the man who won the Nobel Prize and inspired him to go in the first place having invented this thing called quantum mechanics this thin being never wasted words

On some days he would cross the street in front of him his arm pulled behind his back and when they crossed paths the undergraduate wondered if he could ever push himself that far and it was sport to read the chalkboards that filled in the hall and try to make sense of the equations of the grand unified field

Some in the Department said the man knew the secret of the universe but talk is cheap that’s why we do mathematics

And on his way back from college he passes by the dorm room window playing music across the quadrangle the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

He looks down to the sidewalk where someone painted a quote from Paul Atreides

With each step the flesh surrenders itself and eternity takes back its own Our bodies stirred these waters briefly danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self dealt with a few strange ideas then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not…yet I occurred.

And some days he sits with pen and paper across the street from the yard of the great man wondering what kind of work really matters or if he could ever push himself that hard

He was a man who said that scientists try to explain things no one has ever understood in ways everyone can and poets try to explain things everyone already understands in ways that no one can but the sun grows dim so he sets down his pen and reflects upon a childhood memory of a dolphin that hit his beach one day internal compass gone wrong and for whatever reason crashing onshore and even though he was young he knew if it did not get out of the sun it would die the plastic pail of water pouring over its gray skin while other men some noble gathered around and lifted up the dolphin to carry it back to the ocean disoriented it returns and the men struggle their strength almost over at last succeed the dolphin recedes on the horizon time for a drink

Then he remembers his mother driving him in her car past the place he thought was a haunted castle and he remembers the light that shone through broken bottles affixed to the top of the wall in shades of green and brown and blue

But the sun has decided the matter and if he would work it must be elsewhere so he gathers his pen and paper and makes his way across the sidewalk thumbing a coin in his pocket reflecting if given it will be gone and whoever gets it will have one and he none a zero sum game and he wonders how an idea can be given and when it is they have one and so does he

Behind the wall of broken glass his memories bounce into the past a child’s view of the Post Mansion it encircled until it came down but to a young mind it is a great lesson to learn that men will come and they will go but the sea goes on

Walking home he smiles beneath the same broad sky as young Elon except flip day to night and the image of a gray dolphin cutting the water like a nation trying to make way through disinformation

A man named Paul A president named Kamala

And Elon will interview Donald John Trump on Monday

Let’s hope he’s brave enough to ask the questions and not just act like so many other Trump supporters cowering away from the real answers and the weirdly small accordion hands playing the song of lies like a poker tell for if life will go on at all a father embrace will his son even if he is a daughter and move away from the work of Trump’s father who marked people C for Colored just like they did once in South Africa

This is our world and this is our future

And one day the sun will set blue and our soul within will grown to a compass true

There will be life on Mars

It will be me. It will be you.