Thirty years of scoffing at not just birds and trees
but oceans, too. And mountains, bears and lizards.
Burnished grounds and all the
Fucking. Piebald. Thingamabobs.
The sting of hornets and winter.
The wolves mooning over the flat smallish circle up there.
The argument of every blade of grass,
each neatly folded and sharpened,
making its point for the trillionth time.
The chlorophyll-based biochemical
whirligigs in solar wind.
The brainless vegetables and the
crushed bones of children they’d eagerly use
for fuel.
The way our rooted, beatific, ascetic
plant friends
perk right up for a
pile of shit.
The pregnant pause of a passing canyon,
its smoky contents roiling and calorie-free,
slurped through eye-holes by gravity of consciousness,
seeking a vacuum, stuffed like a magic trick,
smoke and mirrors in carved pumpkins.
The dawn’s groggy breath weaving mist through
thistles while the winds strum power lines
thick with blackbirds, the glissando of winged
eighth notes, the unresolved chord.
The trees, oafish high priests.
The iconoclast never found among them.
The giant arms that can’t hug.
The Sea’s mantra, shoom-shush.
The not-blue of the Deep Blue,
the greenish-brown soup instead,
the one salty gulp that short-circuits kidneys.
The monotone of sun, buttery metallic,
the photon bricks smashing car windows
and crashing funerals, insisting upon crevices
of baking garbage,
sparking at costume jewelry and rivers
and skyscrapers and the lacquered irises
of dumb brown sparrows in their pointless
hiding places.
The sun, above all, steaming the
green labial dew of fields, the nymphoid
tease they yield:
the brightness and hopefulness and gratefulness and unity you’re supposed to feel
but don’t.
The unrequited, heartsick agony instead.
The events, one after another, that tell no story.
The terrible truth, the long ass time it’ll take
to lay it out. The question mark needed
at the end to keep it from being a death
sentence.
?