Happiness Reconfigured

Once upon a time, not so long ago

happiness was a product of something else

—to be free of pain, to be warm and fed,

then it became a by-product of profit,

six figures to nine figures, the numerology

of ego and greed, the politics dividing us into

a sixty-forty handicap where a minority

of the certain out-vote the majority

who suspect that low taxes and the economy

have written us, happy or not, out of the future,

who refuse to die in a car crash or overdose,

who question the mathematics of chaos.

Have we become homeless puritans again?

Casting our bodies on the ocean in search

of a new world and finding instead

an old one that was here long before us?

How radical would it be to find happiness

in thoughts moving like fingers scaling

an imaginary piano, or a feeling,

a brief sensory perception of hope?

Suppose these small things moved us away

from the dark resources underground

to the centrifugal forces of our mind

terminally wondering what we can do?

Not as an exclamation of despair or apathy

but a quest, an inquiry into nature, a timeless

question on waking each morning—where did

happiness begin? The big bang?

(published in Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)