Compostable hope You’ll sometimes see a treehouse dangling in the air, But dangling feels, deeply as a swing at its inverted apex, like the wrong word. Although the tightly packed, insightfully architected Wooden planks with no cracks for water and no room to fall – Slabs with such beautiful gradient shimmer that your breath runs away And your eyes jog along their ringed, concentrically grained roads – Craftsmanship worthy of megamansions poured into the construction Of a temple to childhood, innocence, frolicking frivolity – A skylight seamlessly blended with shingles, serendipitously Forming a hole for twinkling starlight to tickle the floor – Although the tightly packed, insightfully architected Wooden planks with no cracks for lacrimal tears and no room to fall Project out over the world below and cast shadows and capture light, And compose a view torn with love and care from a fantasy. You know the trunk is firm, and planted, in both biological And metaphysical senses of the word. Truly rooted. –––––– – – – - - - As it turns out, when the universe was nascent and had cosmic-scale axons Still seeking their myelin caress, It received universe-class training as a little-universally-big league pitcher. The pitch of choice, as it were, was a curveball. Straight-up 12-6. It’s hypnotic, watching the universe step onto the mound; Dig its cleat into the well-trodden cleft between rubber and dirt; Load up energy and tension in itself and its observers, the potential building. Eyes flutter shut for a brief moment, an exhale imperceptible except by intuition. The glove covers cosmic hand and fingers, obscuring a configuration you need Baseball Sign Language to read. “It’s a fastball,” whispers intuition. You’ve seen this pitcher before. You’ve faced him. You’ve spent so many hours of your waking life with eyes glued to reels, Spinning spinning spinning, you know what comes next. Always. Our biggest, unpalatably friendly giant curls up his left leg, Briefly joins the flamingo species, striking the most remarkable balance. Leg extends, gives surrounding bouncing O2 a razor-thin paper-cut. The ball faces second base, and you’re squared up. Fast-twitch fibers at the ready. And you start spinning. No, sorry, that’s the ball. The ball spins! Now your head spins. Our universally revered little-universally-big league pitcher threw us a curveball. Your eyes pop. Straight. Out. Because that tree trunk suddenly has an irreparable gash in its side. The 12-6 sliced clean through. Your roots, your core, the pillars of your existence are shaken Because your treehouse wobbles. It oscillates. No one has ever encouraged you before to think about the utter terror Encoded right into a sine wave. Nothing can reveal the elasticity of twine soul like a sine wave can, When it decides to pluck your heart out with a twang, And starts slinging it back and forth as it’s functionally meant to do. Soul, like a soapy bubble, follows and threatens so probabilistically to burst. Back, forth, back, forth, back back back forth forth forth back forth back DON’T DON’T DON’T FALL. Please, please don’t fall. With heart gone, blood a truant, there’s only one fluid left to lose. Tears. Please, please, please you beg. You’d speak the words if you could, But there’s a waterfall flowing frontally down. Irises color the down-destined river, their spectral rainbows Reflecting along undulating elongating swirls. Please, you cry. Please, don’t fall. This treehouse of magnificence – This castle of creation and palace of mundane paradise. This house of the humans who give everyday existence its sense of home – This Napoleonic defense, this mammoth moat, this untragic tower, This seed germinated by sedition against our little-universally-big leaguer – Against his Sadistic, Satanic, Slimy Stochasticity. Yes, a truly UnRandom House – Please, you cry. Please, don’t plunge. This treehouse into which you’ve packed your most precious belonging: Hope. And it will fall. - - - – – – –––––– While detestable in certain high-schoolian contexts (Not so unlike our now-infamous pitcher), It’s tough to deny that biological systems possess A certain conservational magic to them. Net nil. This is true for biological systems of any scale. Physical systems, actually, too. Even pitchers, no matter which twisted way they choose to throw the ball, Are bound by forces more terrifying than their fluttering butterfly parents To conserve their energy. Let’s don our hardhats And climb the abstraction ladder we can’t help but lean against. By some conservation law they teach you also in a high-schoolian context, Momentum gets conserved. And so the ball flies. Of import to this discussion is that this phenomena occurs Irrespective of the pitch and behavioral manipulation. So here’s the derivation to fill your cheat-sheet, Something you should know so well as to locate topographically in cerebral folds: When curveball strikes, And tear falls in a constructively destructive and beautiful waltz with your treehouse, And wood and water hit ground, Here’s the thing: Something will grow.