WHAT AM I NOT A MAKER Poem by Macgregor Card

Is it possible to know
you must apologize
with everything you have
for offering
the perfect gift?

How could that even feel?

It sounds occult.

I want it, and somehow
I speak for everyone.

It's beautiful.
I know it's beautiful.
You don't need to write
So beautiful.

I'm trying to know
I'm actually sorry
that a perfect gift is
just and condescending.

Here's your gold
balloon-ear,
screaming kid
who sat on gold
balloon-bee

And I've got
a ton of leather
crystal pouches
in the trunk
I'm driving to
the silent
concept-ballad
auction at
that new lyceum
Put on zeppelin?

There's a kind of justice
Okay?

You feel scathing disappointment?
Does that work?

Can you imagine or at least describe
a kind of justice that is
purely visual and without
motion, form or color
but still practical, whose application is
so broad that any gross
or reasonable distinction between
humans, even animals and humans
won't pertain, cannot pertain,
cannot have ever pertained?

Sorry
I was only here
to be frightened
on a table of stone
three feet high
or a table
of vanishing stone
as three feet high
as possible
with water and a sun
that could
support life and
everything—
it's not a joke, not now
and given time
anything will happen.