“A poem about free will and convention in an arboreal setting.”
If I were the wind,
I would whip the clouds away,
until the trees asked for water
to unwind the skies
and let the rain roar down.
If I was a worm,
I would curl in a secret hole,
explore the brown deep,
and itch my back on the spine
of the rocky earth.
If I were the trees,
I would praise the clouds,
chat with the worms and birds,
and hope the humans
never want to break the root.
for the root is all,
for a tree that is.
Because the plans of a tree
do not exist, unlike
our plans for trees.
but a tree may still hope,
because a will is not hooked
to an intelligent brain,
but it is an automatic flair for life
to live and live more.
So before you dismiss the natural
tendencies of unbroken will,
please be wise to the design of words
like will, freedom, and life,
so all that lives has the will to be awake.
“Write about strangers.”
Every bracket of flesh on this landmark
that we call Earth, is stranger once.
In every trail there is a passerby,
a clear pity on the roads.
We strut our burdens together,
in a miser’s maze of conflict
and heart’s lost verse.
We are the stones in the creek,
a lost collection seeking investment.
We cuddle our webbing fates,
binding our rattling fiction
into one pool of strange togetherness.
“Dick Cheney’s Robot Heart”
He growls upon darker paths,
like a metal moss moving
to enrich a rusty madness
bringing the pitch black home.
He spears us; until we swallow gallows,
and he wafts all peace away
with every triangulated plot that
he constructs. Oily black plans.
Now, we gather patience for his grave,
waiting for his metal to rust,
but his heart beats on,
til’ the smog covers his husk.
“dizzy vertical drops”
The air in my head formed a pretzel,
salty and fashioned like hard bread,
unbundling my sanity on the fall
Onward, the memories plunge into me.
wind howling with ancient tempest
all purpose taken by the scooping clouds,
I feel my neurons screech criminally
they break and crack, raspy; crunch.
Onward, the sky screams into me.
Into the dizzy blue, all past above,
controls blasting away from memory
panicked knots of visions hot, singeing the sky.
Onward, the Earth plunges into me,
one shadow flickering through sharp branches.