Broken Open

The window tells

the end of telling

as it breaks

Wind refuses a message

Outside shatters in

The land cannot approve

or teach. Water cares nothing

for prophecy

Your love, not your fealty

will find expression

when the sovereign

stops granting freedom

to what is free

We will eat, sleep and speak

with others and someday die,

this is all

The last cage standing is your mind

And it, like others, will be defeated

What it seeks to contain

could never be

How to Survive a Shipwreck

Become a fish.

Fireworks

Yesterday you were singing

and now you are enslaved

The screen turns "help"

into "having a good time!"

Understory rusts

russet, 

birds clap silent

Those cowering hiss from sparks

behind teeth

Those disfigured mass:

It is now their time

When I am so lost,

the well of my desire to see

all life held as a newborn

it is obvious to care for

inverts,

erupts in caustic smoke and

I imagine plucking

my own head from my shoulders

and flinging it to the sky

where it explodes in announcement

I have opened myself to the belief

that this is how I will die

In My Movie

The movie
is flickering yellow
on the screen

An old onion a mirror
of voided eyes

Thorns shred
the screen

hoary lead-swelled
leaves drop through

swell toward
artificial light

When the filmgoers
know that this is not

the show
they shift

While fifteen
whitetail deer flash green eyes
sing and corvids click their
tongues

Pollen hits the light
and splinters into colord spires

The audience moves to leave
but is met with blackberry
who bar the door

and a talk follows
which has been coming
which few folks wanted
to hear

An Understanding

In the yard, he was out there, out in the dusk. The sun was so low I couldn't see him, just his silhouette. Up this mountain, I wouldn't expect visitors. When I saw him, hunched over and rocking, the shape of his body, like a child, an adolescent kid and the sly little laugh, a giggle he let loose when I opened the screen door with my thirty aught-six and cocked it.

I could see the shape of his head: pointy. His ears were pointy, too, and he stood and a little tail, quick as a snake darted out from behind his and swished. His eyes were bright yellow.

I didn't know what to say. I said “Get the fuck out of here!”

He said, in this little whisper voice: “You can't escape.” And then he jumped through the underbrush, laughing louder.

I went inside. I was cooking an elk steak. I looked at the shelf with my ammo, with my water skins and leather. I knew what he meant. I had heard the voices at night. A deer had come through that morning, through the yard and growled. At me, a doe. Lowered its head and growled like a bobcat or something. I had run inside.

I went outside with a cigarette and up to the sky I yelled “Okay!” and an oak tree fell over and crushed my cabin. I ran down the path, down the side of the mountain. The earth began to crack and shudder. In the gathering dark, I heard bodies all around me, rushing through the grass, drawing closer, crying out, braying. I got to clearing, a draw that went down pretty steep. The animals came forward, pushing me back toward where the draw tipped down. The sun went down. I saw the animals come toward me, closer. Gathering. He was there covered in yellow ivy and they all broke out in blue fire.

I said to him “We had a deal.”

He said “We never had a deal.”

Mise en place

Her hair was made out of mostly garbage. Her braces were full of what looked like seafood and her skin was like a new burn. Her dress smelled like old milk. On her way home from school, after a day spent mostly running from the outstretched hands of her classmates, who were trying to hit or shove her, she'd crawl under a chain-link fence, into an abandoned lot and sing. Quietly, so that no one would find her. She would tap out beats on the back of her hand and stutter.

The best time of the year for her was when the barn spiders started to come out, in late spring. She would pick through the shrubs that crowded the lot and watch them grow from tiny little spiderlets into big, bloated fruit in summer, ripening to kinked tigers that would ultimately go immobile in the fall. There were some blackberries, but they were tart and had the texture of wet ash. They were delicious to her.

She saw no one here, was brought out of knowledge of herself, transfixed on the weeds and amazed when a hundred ants would carry off a writhing caterpillar on their backs into a tangle of grass. She could see the sun, same as anyone's, through one weird old apple tree that looked dead but was barely alive.

When they built a grocery store on that lot, she fucking burned it down.

Amuse bouche

The telling listed

the ant-swarmed candy

in the mouth

Propped on browning tooth

of the sleeping boy

His song, his song

was insistently sung

I want I want

I want

He dreamt of the

green falling fire

all night long

His hands pawed

the suffering clutch