Red Oak Tree

Cut a foot into a century tree and find a maggot who beat me there.
Like a shook soda, black ants pour a fountain out of another cut.
Cut the whole tree down and a twig of a limb throws off my chain.
It’s not a dogwood, but the bark has a bite. We’re both bleeding from the wrists.
I knew the risks. The tree, I’m not so sure. A white oak cherry poplar surprise.
Sourwood, sweetgum, sassafras, sick of more. Maple a muscle. Cedar I’m sore.

I burned gas, and dripped oil, and filed down metal teeth to see where that insect was.
I murdered many burglars when I tore down the house we were robbing.
And I saved a tree by killing it. Given it an eternal death in preservation
its hundred year form could not afford. I went to school with a beetle
in its larval stage and we each learned how to lap our tongues clean
through the limber heart of timber.

The infant who wrote a dissertation in his crib. I cut mine to inch and quarter floorboards.
For a house that will outlive me. But me and my classmates, we’ll forever be the only ones
who knew the sound it made when a hundred years of red oak tree smacked the ground
and made it shake.

Someone else’s grapes

Off to dig a hole deep and wide
enough to bury three and a half foot of railroad tie
and hang warped, ripped, busted cattle-fence against
to trellis unpurchased infant grape vines

not a branch, a pole, a shovelful is mine
not even seconds bloomed minutes wilted leaves hours

at work toward a harvest I will never taste is like grace
building trellises for someone else’s grapes.

Singletary Lake

Sand flats and scrub oaks and Spanish moss you pinch because
it is so real it looks fake. As the pictures you take.
The sunset through trees. Not out over open breeze.
Loblolly candelabras coned allover tips ablaze in the AM sun.
The trees stand on singed feet and wherever you are going
there are signs of omens
where fire has been
where water is.

White Hot Home

Hot pink. Cold blue. Lukewarm brown. Tepid canary.
Vacation-ocean turquoise. Pine taupe. Cedar flesh.
Red oak rose. The green that shows in paint but never nature.
I don’t know the nomenclature. But I know what you mean
when you say poop brown. City-gray. Brick orange.
Charcoal roads that lead the way to white hot home.

Honey Please

Whether means a choice between alternatives. Weather does too. Wether does not, because a wether is a ram with his alternatives removed. You’ve got heather light as feathers forever. And then never. Never lands right where it is spoken, and creates a sort of token so that others can revisit and trade their famous catchphrase, ‘I told you so’. Say never never, or never say never, I can never remember, directions to Denver. I’ve never been. On an endeavor west of east. Homebody with the last name Homesley. I figure. It was meant to be. I was mean to bees. They gave it right back, and I took it wrong and ran headlong leaving off the clothes I had on in a funny looking trail behind me. Ground bees. Into a fine powder. Honey please, come back after an hour. Omniscience hopped an Omnibus and read an omnibus of her favorite books, and wrote a line in the margin of one, it read, do I know how it feels to forget? Can’t know everything, can we? Lost is forgot becomes forgotten. Cost is your loss becomes a profit. You’re not a prophet for reading road signs. Those guys are sweating in assembly lines stamping out printed signs, and they read the writing on the wall of the breakroom with precise, six forty-five aim. Quitting time. Oops, hit the wrong letter. Quilting time. Everybody go to your haystack, find your needle, and thread it. If I was a betting man, I’d say a bedding man could bring his work home with him every night and no one would mind. But when the betting man tries the same, let’s just say, the horse isn’t the one who loses the race.

All Out of Season

Walking quiet in the woods.
Backpack stuffed with goods.
Apple. Cold hamburger. Juice. Water.
Journal. 22 on one hip.
Belt ax and multitool on the right.
Shoes fit right. Or would’ve been left behind.
Nothing louder than a dog-breath.
She wants to go.
All a walk is to my dog is a long enough reason
to turn back home. In many ways, the superior species.
All the comfort of our technology with absolutely no responsibility.
We tell ourselves heads was a better choice than tails.
The self-aggrandizing tales we tell.

Trying to walk quiet as can be through a sea of poisonous leaves.
Trying to sneak up on animals is like trying to rob a thief.
Those who live by it will always be better at such things.
Not me. I’ve no reason to be quiet in the woods.
The right last name and all this poison
means I share this place with no person.
Only early morning animals.
Safe beyond reason.
All out of season.

Love is a security system.

When what is taught as kindness is represented as basic expectation
loving your neighbors is the first, most passive and inexpensive line of defense.
Love is a security system. You don’t need to be kind to be decent.
You only need to see beyond the present.
Your neighbor can’t be homeless.
You are not savior or saint for saying it.
Wealth is not a latch on your door, it’s a lock on your neighborhood.
Wealth surrounded by poverty is a nosebleed in the ocean while snorkeling.
You won’t be able to afford to shut your door tight enough
to stop us seeing you peeking through the blinds.
We know what’s running through your mind.
When your eyes look back over your shoulder.
The have-not world is shaped by the have’s paranoia.

Selfishly. Egotistically. Totalitarianistically.
Love is one hundred percent self-centered.
Make sure your neighbors don’t all hate your living guts.
You’re not Jesus for fighting homelessness.
You’re putting up magical fences in your yard.
You’re nailing down invisible doors.
You’ve drilled clear cold iron bars over all your windows
you’ll never need or see or grip longing to be free.
This amazing thing happens when people see more legal
than illegal means to obtain life’s necessities
that the richest of the poorest of us need
this crazy thing
we’d almost all rather live legally.

The Sapphire Dawn

Love. A river of milk. Framed by mountains of silk. 

A feathery cradle for filth. Love. An army of doves 

against an army of shotguns chasing mates in the sun. 

Mate for life shot from the sky by a man who cheats on his wife.

Have you ever seen a sapphire dawn? Me neither. But I have yawned

at wonders that would have ruined the minds of my ancestors. 

How the earth peeps through the windows of heaven.

Most of us never did anything important naked. 

Except for love.

High as a kite

Strangers can’t sense your synthesis.

They don’t know you’ve been going through shit.

You don’t look like you’ve had a breakthrough. You look broke.

You look like you left something bleeding in the bathroom.

You look high as a kite about to be on a plane.

Strangers don’t know what they do to you.

We all betrayed our true selves in a bathroom.

We’re all strangers. In public.

We’re all each other’s mirror.