Some form. Or another.

I believe we are all some form of tree, reaching toward some form of sun,
digging as deep down as possible with some form of root system.
All that this man is is not on the surface, like a tree.
There is far more to us than can be seen, or achieved, or stood beneath.

We are all stacking cells like bricks, burrowing into our eternal selves
like we were digging wells, into the still flowing aquifers we all have
eddying in our core somewhere, eroding washed out circling lines
that record our time, and tell, at least, the length of our stories,
which no other life can cut into and realize until after we die,
expire, like the tree parted from roots, burned by some form of fire.
Leave some ash as dust upon the earth. Some rich white breath
to drift off and become clouds. The body eroded until no trace can be found,
except for some form of still buried root beneath a weeping stump.

I believe death will not be the end of us.
We are like some estranged form of tree.
We have not existed all on the surface.
There is much to Man that can not be seen, or destroyed,
or burned down by simple fire. Every ounce
of every being still exists after it has expired.

In some form.
Or another.

No Free Dinner for the Wise

You come to terms with dying because you intend to live.
It doesn’t mean you won’t fight to keep alive,
it just recognizes the reality that there will come a circumstance when you don’t.
Enlightenment is like that moment during an amazing dinner,
something you didn’t plan on, a meal set out most likely by a stranger,
when you feel called to ask how you can pay for it.
The moment you create a bill for yourself,
even though none was ever handed to you.
Foolish to everyone except the wise. The enlightened.
Who came to terms with dying.
Just to get on with life.

That good cholesterol

I have a soft yellow heart like a hard-boiled egg.
I have arrived at terms with death. It is only pain
still testing the cracks in my shell,
finding me in the safe places I dwell,
and itching me there. Tangling my hair,
stubbing stumpy toes and talking with a tone
I would not hand out to a child. All the while
the wild laughs at my labor, which was not an intentional joke.
Life’s rapid, aggressive, responsive regrowth,
strikes me more like revenge. Not passionate,
desperate, hurt and hurtful, blood for hungry vengeance,
but a more quiet, natural, insinuated, obligatory sort.
The sort a parent strikes out on their progeny in old age.
Cage for cage. Trapped in prisons built like guilt, and responsibility.
There is no joy in plants to witness the worker pant,
tear flesh encircling wrists, planting the seed of that awful itch,
right through calcium walls, the smooth soft almost not
quite off white jiggly unbroken membrane,
into my fertile, flakey, as close to orange as a color can go
and still remain yellow, heart.
Like the buried center of a hard-boiled egg.
Art has led me to establish acceptable terms with death.
But pain. Slipping fingernails beneath broken skin
peeling me hungrily to pieces. I’m still working
on a rapport with pain. With a sensitive blood-mover
like mine, I am sure to suffer in life. Just not in vain.