[when This Plane Goes Down I Want To Be Sitting Beside You] {for Karen V.} Poem by Shane Markie

When this plane goes down, I want to be sitting beside you,
your hand atop mine, my hand resting on your thigh
when the air cracks in two and the oxygen masks drop
and the attendants float around the cabin like lost balloons, the ones without enough helium to lose themselves in the sky, when all the screams become one scream and we push it behind us and start to fall, your hand atop mine, my hand resting on your thigh, toward the trifling patchwork of farm and park and baseball diamond, or toward the circuit board of a city shivering.

We can fall toward the men and women
who live as though the world is already burning, the ones
whom god has called to rise from this scabrous plain, or the ones who sell their brothers and sisters daily to the mulch pile
for another chance at glory, no, not even glory, for another chance to rule and power is the only rule, power grinds mountains into dust and dust into fuel and fuel is the beast
that carries them into the fortress, locks the gates and pays
the mercenaries to walk the walls, it tints their sunglasses
and wraps the wires they stick in their ears.

Or we could fall toward the center of the ideogram, the heart of the advertisement, the mainspring, the all-seeing eye, and pray for absorption so, rather than die, we might multiply and occupy the other world, the one we make with our bodies in space, the one that floats up from our bodies like scent rising from a rose, the map that we carry and share and inscribe together—

but that is not a life, yearning to be another stain on the wine-press, one more palimpsest lurking on channel 132,257,308; instead, let's just fall, your hand atop mine, my hand on your thigh, and look at me so we might live each in the others' eye,
an infinite recursion of selves and eyes, each smiling the same, each ringed with hair alive in the wind that strokes the earth.