It's funny, how forgotten people slink back
Into your consciousness. You might be
Sitting at the most unremarkable
Of tables, digesting your morning Cheerios, mouth full
With the next mindless bite,
When down the neck of the spoon, there is Amanda Mortimore -
Your seventh-grade crush,
curled up in the bowl.

What could she possibly want, hiding in leftover
Milk like that? You add more cereal, hoping
She won't tell you you've dribbled a little
On your chin, and that
You should really pay more attention to your wife.

Certainly, this wasn't how you pictured
Your next encounter. If you'd known there'd be cereal,
You'd have picked something more like Weetabix -
Solid and hearty, instead of these corn-and-oat o's.

But even sturdy food accessories won't change
The parts of you that were never the self
You wanted to be around her,
Never the self you wanted to be.

Oh, crunch. Pour yourself some soy milk, this time.
Each of her three kids is, at this moment,
swallowing their own recent memories
in other bowls of Cheerios,
At an equally unremarkable table
in a small town outside Madison, Wisconsin.

if one year to a person
is like seven years to a dog

then ten minutes of fluvial geomorphology
is my infinity of dreamy, versed joy (oh!),
pumping through the sleekly conditioned labyrinths
of an outstretched heart.

take me to the runways, baby!
let's rise, glide into the upper troposphere
on an escalator of intellect
until the universe, in ecstatic grace,
thins our breaths -
and we gasp for oxygen molecules
and freeze our lovelorn lungs,
sliding our heads into a flying balloon
bloated with our own intoxicants.

but we are elastic -

and is the bridge we daily sculpt
from the savory, madcap clay
of gently misplaced hand-towels,
unbrushed teeth, earnest crossword mistakes,

dismissed for blissful footfalls
in the first of sixty mid-piedmont hikes
and contented nights of dreamless sleep,
each day an urgent mapping
of every simple, passing consciousness.