A Toast

A Toast

 

A toast to the great moment; the first opening of that glass door

Into the pull and push of the office; to the building of a mountain.

 

To the echoes of Girltown; to four cubes long transformed

into a field of lilies, of bees, of blossoms.

It’s a world built like the thread on a spinning wheel.  

 

A toast to each day and each product’s evolutionary reach 

From Track to Report to Port to Watch like seeing a fish grow legs –

The weight of transformation on its back and the long, long road ahead.

A toast to a world that is always cruelest to the first of its kind.

 

To the great gray leader, from gray to white, smart to the brink of crazy,

Everyday it’s running with scissors to save a life,

everyday its pulling the sky down and asking to have it slipped into his pocket.

Everyday goes beyond the everyday and you find out your hands

Touched something special; a meteorite, a white buffalo.

 

To the Jedi down the hall that slips in and out with the wave of his head;

leaving a shadow like an oncoming train; a force that can take you

from dark to light to thought to truth.

 

To the councils and clockwatchers; to the voices long into the night

To the smiles and the frowns; to those lost and to those found

To the John, the Tim, the Steven, the Gerard, the Tracy, the Shelly,

To them there is the Ed, the Paula, the Jody, the Dylan, the Howard, the Jeff, the Adam.

A toast to those who have danced on the fire and those who swallowed it whole.

 

To the birth of the horn; waterlogged and scissor’d,

Pure in his piece of mind; to his heart beating like the boom boom

Of breaking walls and boxes dropping. Cupped in hand

he would gladly murder the world if we told him to.

A toast to that uncut loyalty, the pure form in a vial in hand.

 

To every tear in every eye, all the sweat shed,

to every tire mark left on lonely Kansas roads, the din of airplane food,

the bleeding gums and bent faces. To the dark of times,

in the O8s or O9s when that great fear welled up over the dam —  

a great pair of hands tearing us down to the sinew and tissue,

down to the blood and the frame –

stripped our skeletons down to the barcode of bones.

 

 

 

 

 

To the glasses raised on Horn hill; tall and bald and singing

Into the deep shadows of dawn.

A toast to the wave after wave after wave, the relentlessness

of energy, the breathing of a heavy fight and the rising up.

Breath for the rising up because it is what makes impossible a slave.

 

To the fights and the secret wars that pull at the stiches of the injury;

To the emails typed with the face of a harpy and never sent;

to the warpaint in the morning and at the end of the day.

And in the end the hands; the hands that shook and made a difference.

Together we push the boulder back up the hill.       

Together we toast the future and the boulder going over the hill.

 

To the beautiful gray image, the stone born from the ash of a mind,

A straight line grown over jagged hill scans, a sentry, a minute man,

A mind wrapped around gray armor, the kick to the system,  

A symbol of smart shining as the sun is a symbol of light.

 

To the Post Office; to the friend; to the enemy,

To the brink of delirium, the letterbound void of madness,

The constant flow and reflow of data to hands

To data to mail to data to those among you

Who can read it like a living Rosetta stone.

 

A toast to the young lions/esses that sacrifice shit and shingles,

Who slave to make the wise understand the wisdom

Of erratic thought-driven youth. To those original wise ones,

To the osmosis of the soul and the screaming birth that brings morning.

 

To the laughter, to the comedy, to the drink and the drunk

And the sober, to hysterics and the cackling voices down the open doors,

The lips that part to say the single word that makes

The gray grayer and world better – the word that swells

A typhoon over tongue, through teeth, a spring of tornado.

 

To when you realize that facing you is the life you make of it;

To when you realize the place where you stand is the place

You need to be; were born to be.

Years of crazy meets the just right recipe of genius

And modern day madness. Weep when you know this.

Tell others, write it on the walls, a middle finger to every told you so,

Every person who sat you down and set you straight.

 

I make this toast to the great heart of the company,

The great heavy thump thump of the birth of each new idea

Off the maroon walls, the sound of thunder

Ripping through your ribcage and the last exhalation in your lungs.

 

A toast to the way we pull at each other;

The molding of this life into the hair, the blood, the eyes, the skin

A toast to the bleeding of gray and raise your glasses

To the great success spread out in front of us all.

 

A Toast