The barista snickers.

He’s been pulling

on his beard for an hour

looking at infinite

varieties of coffee

beans harvested

from sides of mountains

he’s seen in dreams.

She’s pretty sure

he stumbled into

a teen chat room,

mystified by encoded

banter. When she

comes by to offer

a refill, he deftly

scrambles with the two-

button mouse to rid

his screen of

pornography and

get back to CNN.

He plays a game

of Texas Hold ’em

under the pseudonym

Nostradamus and snorts

when he gets a bad

beat on the river.

Predictably, he’s stalled

on a Home Depot ad

for fertilizer,

meditates on the too-

green grass of 32

bit color quality.

we spin on our axis every day

oblivious to the pending shift,

barely aware

that pluto may be just a transneptunian object

in the retinue of celestial objects

out there among

the interplanetary dust,

xena has been spotted,

greater in size

and mass than puny pluto

though we think earth

the center of the universe,

despite newton and the others,

that heliospheric current sheet,

the largest structure

in the solar system,

resembles nothing more than

a wide mobius strip;and our solar system

is merely a sizable speck

nestled in a far quadrant

of the spirals

of the milky way galaxy

so when our lives

twist in upon themselves,

and our egos besot us with

the importance of our own orbit,

think of pluto,

about to fall

from the litany of the

hallowed hierarchy,

about to lose its planetness

and become only

a kuiper belt object.