You have probably come across those scales in planetariums that tell you how much you would weigh on other planets.

You have noticed the fat ones lingering on the Mars scale and the emaciated slowing up the line for Neptune.

As a creature of average weight, I fail to see the attraction.

Imagine squatting in the wasteland of Pluto, all five tons of you, or wandering around Mercury wondering what to do next with your ounce.

How much better to step onto the simple bathroom scale, a happy earthling feeling the familiar ropes of gravity,

157 pounds standing soaking wet a respectful distance from the sun.

In the democracy of daisies every blossom has one vote. The question on the ballot is Does he love me?

If the answer's wrong I try another, a little sorry about the petals piling up around my shoes.

Bees are loose in the fields where daisies wait and hope, dreaming of the kiss of a proboscis. We can't possibly understand

what makes us such fools. I blame the June heat and everything about him.

At the begining of every August, when it's still hot and the leaves are still green, I sit and watch a rite of passage. Young people, not that I am too old, mill about with eager faces, older people in tow, older people we call mom or dad. Thus with this another clock
I measure the passing of time.

It's seven A.ME(after ME) now, and that ME has changed in shape, has lost hair, gained lines on the face, tasted sorrow, despair, truimph, love and such things one has to learn in a unique crucible of time.

I write better now, but I don't see as well,for along with accuring thicker glasses I realise I have accured hesitation and a measure of cynicism. I have tricked myself into accepting more and rebelling less.

So on overhearing conversations at tables, of which classes to take, of moms discussing anxiously food and such talk and shaking of hands of strangers that comes with transitions, I invoke these older selves that were yet to see and thus were eager to yet to leap thus could leap beyond and yet to know the dos and the donts. Thus with this invocation I travel to all that I was and all that I can still become.

2002:07:29 17:30 Atlanta

Freshmen Orientation Day at Georgia Tech.