Is
the rocket
crashing
or simply coming in to land?
Is your fate
as yet unknown
or by birth forever damned?
Are genetics
but a program
pre-determined ping-pong balls
reaching out
across the days
until your darkness falls?
Can we translate
our future selves
and effect some sort of change
or is the truth
more circumscribed
within some finite range?
'Free will? There is no choice,"
he said
and then lied about his age
avoided service
in the war
to live out on the page.
If ifs and and ands
were caused to turn
as if upon their head
the dying would be
still alive
and we would be the dead.
These arguments
have been made
repetitively by man
for if the heart
imagines it
these heads believe we can.
for Jeffrey Hamilton