Pale Blue Balloon

“God has a brown voice,

as soft and full as beer.” –Anne Sexton

Age is so much more than numbers

and cakes and balloons. Time has dominated

age, and I so desperately want to go back,

to go back to the numbers and the cakes

and the balloons I would kiss and send

into the sky for my mother, floating

like a lost bluebird—Bukowski’s

bluebird freed from oppression.

I kissed a balloon and sent it into the sky

to my Plato, my grand keeper, a few years

back, and it got caught in a tree limb—

like nature’s hemisphere, an invisible cage,

balloon still singing—but had I been six,

six and a half, I would have turned before

it popped because they would have turned

my shoulders away, a Texas Hold’em

card flipped and revealed. They would have

turned my shoulders from the balloon because

they knew, they knew it wouldn’t make it up there,

and science class told me it would pop

when air density matched gas density,

and I still never believed them. It seems

to be the same way with Darwin.

It seems to be the same way with God.

I used to hear the brown voice of God

until one night, fifteen, I shot up in bed

like an autopsy gone wrong, and I imagined

myself on that table, that slab, an empty

beer can filled with cigarette butts

in a casket, and I cried, cried for the ashes

of myself first, and then for humanity’s.

I beg for the brown voice now. A color

wheel of exploration, the voice has

become a mixture of the primary colors,

colors taken from each prayer. My prayers

combine in the sky—Aurora Borealis

vomiting answers to the unknown.

And I so desperately need that toilet

brown voice, no matter the color,

but I don’t release balloons anymore.

Like God, I turn shoulders.

“God is as close as the ceiling.

Though no one can ever know,

I don’t think he has a face.” –Anne Sexton