By: Richard LeDue

“Discombobulated Again”

An old song sounds new again,
taking me back
to being in high school again,
when I heard it for the first time
as we drove around with nowhere to go
and believed the music wouldn’t age
us, but it did,
so now all my dreams have comb-overs
or lie to themselves that every grey hair
is the same as wisdom,
only for you and all your deep questions
about the lyrics
(punctuated by your youthful enthusiasm)
to become quieter in a rite of passage
I never asked for,
leaving me
with all the people I know well enough
to not care about talking to them for years.

And now all I can do is accept death
circles me like a backwards word
in a word search,
and maybe you’re actually next to me
in the most abstract sense:
misspelled in an error that proves
heaven or hell or purgatory or the asteroid
that ends our civilization and gives birth
to the next try at humanity
are all more complicated
than the puzzle book existence
people like best when there’s an answer key.

“The fish don’t care”

that we invented AI,
nor will they pity
our lungs dying of thirst
for the oxygen we take for granted
when a great tsunami arrives
to reset the machine we call existence,
while the next wave reprograms it.

Our dreams of living on Mars,
of self driving cars, of curing
all disease and of creating
sugar free cookies
that taste just like the real thing
drowned in that same flood,
leaving the future to dismiss us
as another myth or allegory,
and our descendents will be certain
we never were and that they are
the first to please the gods.

“Time’s Unspoken Truth”

It’s listening to Vivaldi again,
but knowing the only immortal sound
is silence, which sounds the same
as time feigning at being
speechless like someone too polite
to point out the impracticality
of wanting to live forever.

It’s reading Shakespeare,
but noticing the yellowing of the pages
instead of the bard’s ghost,
while time gives a patronizing look
at our belief in words being anything
other than names on gravestones
covered up by moss.

It might be a tsunami or earthquake
from an asteroid that took a wrong turn
that turns our art into rubble
and debris drowning in the sea
and all our history just another lost civilization
that historians (or whatever they’re called
in the future) will argue about how
we never truly existed.

It’s thoughts like these that make sunlight,
outwitting my closed curtains,
seem like a brilliant brush stroke,
giving me a reason to smile
at how the creativity of the universe
is so easy
to confuse with feeling insignificant,
but that’s what time is trying to tell us.

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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He has been published both online and in print and is the author of numerous books of poetry. His latest full length book, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.