I once dreamt of approaching Lenin From a distance as he sat outside At a Parisian café, scribbling something On a napkin, and Imagined that he had been struck By the urge to write a poem.

But as I grew closer, wondering What words he'd braided into stanzas, He paid and left; and I saw that his napkin Was blackened with battle plans and diagrams, Saturated by the absence of a poem.

In this dream perhaps I stumbled backwards Through the streets of Paris, seeing The Eiffel Tower uprooted and Melted into metal for chips To embed in brains of poets To convert feelings into Centrifugal force for the sake Of a muddy metaphor for utopia.

And so you and I refuse to be Lenin, Who once listened to Beethoven’s Appassionata and said:

"What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!"

Yet as I stumble backward, to where do I stumble?

Do I fall through the doors Of a chamber hall and spend my days there Weeping to Beethoven Until I tumble into the arms of a lover And roll with them to the base of a hill, Content to make a picnic on a checkered blanket In the grass, eating crawfish And lie there for all my days, In an embrace as the moon rises Over the hill and projects a dagger Before me – one bloodied not by acts, as Lenin’s, But by omissions, as I look down at My hands, reddened by the crawfish, Its beady eyes multiplied A billion times, across silent seas, And the ghosts behind them Unable to presume, much less plead As their bodies are scooped and boiled For our dinners and picnics?

The dagger drips and I see Reflected in a bloody bead The mute man without legs Who begged for my quarters On the subway six years ago And who I saw again last week Still going car by car Holding a bucket of change And plunking it down As he crawls across the dirty floor As people turn their heads To avoid the horror of the image.

And in the next bead there is A flash consuming the legless man And all of New York; The flash clears And in its aftermath, The skin of my mother Falls limp from her body, Like a Hiroshima statistic, And radiation poisons the water.

A final bead drips And in it there is the greatest horror: The image of absence, Of a trillion voices and all their children, Trees, and laughs, and beasts, and sex, And jazz, and the sensation of a breeze through one’s hair Made mute.

Lay us on a beach with mezcal in our hand And let palm trees sway above, And yet we cannot unsee these things we have seen – And so you and I refuse to turn our head from these horrors, And least of all the last: a universe saturated by the absence Of a poem, or diagrams, or battle plans; An endless stretch of silence, An ending to our world’s greatest and only story: mind.

We refuse to turn our heads because even on that beach, With the palms overhead, We find ourselves constitutionally unable.

And now, what is left, If it is neither in our nature to Leninize ourselves into oblivion, Nor lie on a blanket or beach and pretend That we do not care, or that we have forgotten?

It seems to me that there is only one thing left For minds born under such circumstances: I think of the billions of years of earth As the colliding of atoms birthed cells, As cells birthed creatures with cortices, As cortices grew to support minds holding culture, As culture coordinated cortices to create infrastructure of thought and action, As infrastructure summed underneath us for millennia, Until you and I were born with eyes gleaming With hidden verses, unabashed ambition, and humility, Surviving long enough for us to find one another To clumsily yet steadily develop an art To unearth those verses And carefully put them to benefit for allkind.

May we presume that the weight and providence of life’s history Gave odds to a strange and narrow path, Where a community of people May blacken napkins with diagrams And yet learn to write poetry in the margins And then, with humility, with compassion, Act to protect the future of that history?

We might be fools to presume, Given our awkward appearance, That we can become this group, But when I think of the precipice on which we find ourselves, I am certain we’d be greater fools to presume that we cannot.

And so, on behalf of a trillion voices and all their children, Trees, and laughs, and beasts, and sex, And jazz, and the sensation of a breeze through one’s hair, And most of all, hidden verses that cause the eyes to gleam, We presume.