Something Like We Did II
By Tim Seibles
Light years in time, ahead of our time.
—George Clinton, “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”
They did not
expect to, nor did they
find us
beautiful
despite how much
we loved to see
ourselves
despite the way
we dressed
our bodies—
as though both trying
to hide and begging
to be seen. The way
our hands moved
when we spoke
startled them
and our mouths:
the animal sounds we called
laughing struck them
as a kind of
punctuation
in a world
whose machinery
never stopped
eating
our lives
though we
had made it
though we
worked hard
to maintain it.
This is why
they would not
harm us: our aggressive
stupidity
that we could not
see was visible
to them like a halo
of cellophane capping
our heads—which
appeared to grow
a restless vegetation
that we attended
more than our
actual lives, which
seemed to be
what we wanted
to avoid: our fragility
the imminence
of History and worry
about what we called
the future—
though it had
already come
while we
averted our eyes
and often forgot
the constellations
between which
the Earth swerved
