Forever Children

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Peeling pines, slicing sap, raw chicken under that, turning trees into fence posts, hands into tape, reshape sticks so they can be stuck eight feet apart along a property line older than I am. The land is the oldest member of the family. With some grandchildren pushing half a century. We could build a barn from a thinning, a clear cutting would only be the beginning of paying the bills and paving the fields that stretch pasture horizons. So I’m building fences the way Noah did his boat. Like a crazy person. Doing more work to pay into a belief than some do to pay their bills. Building to fulfill a future billing. One only I can see through the trees, which are thick and stifling, and create long winding hallways like the labyrinth planted by dead grandpa Dedalus, his one and only son couldn’t help but fly so close to the other one, forty years spent self-exiled from his own inheritance. So his wings melted. Feathers scattered. Wax splattered. 

When I got here, a Minotaur was running the farm milking swollen titans and twisting venomous serpents striped the stumps, Medusa did no chores but loved to hump, hissing valkyries laid their eggs but no one came to collect them, no one cut the grass, no one shut the gate. When I got here, the land was farmed by fate. I showed up ten years too late. Like some kind of agricultural Theseus. Still trying and almost dying to prove our selves to parents who don’t belong to us, and who we never belonged to in the first place. 

Humanity, forever children, just, children of the Gods.

The Bait

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Take and plant this seed. Be patient,
soon we’ll eat. For now,
give it to darkness. Same place all else
grows rotten. And see this seed will grow.
But change is not soon stopping. With water,
sunlight, and timing, this seed soon will be vining.
Then take and eat these beans.
Months ago you held as seeds.
Think how we had nothing,
we still planted the seed.

Now deep inside yourself,
highest on the shelf,
buried in soil spelled soul.
Look hard within your self, and know.
You were once this seed. Seeds still there
inside you. The bitter and tooth-breaking.
Least sweet, and least worth tasting.

Here comes the farmer now.
One who respells soil soul.
The one who gathers seeds.
Not food or fruit, seeds alone.
Be bitter, or be sweet.
We are not judged by how we taste.
But instead by what we wasted,
because we never tasted.
Sweetness isn’t the destination.
It was only ever the bait.

The Monopolization of Need

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

It takes the greatest power to give up power. It is the rarest trait witnessed in Mankind. There are those in the world in the grip of lesser power who scoff at the idea that anyone would give it up, they laugh and they deny the existence of those who would refuse to drink from their rim-stained cup. They hate their lives, which they’ve turned into never ending seeks and never ending hides, and their new friends are always their best friends until they find new friends and it never ends that they always end. Haven’t called their mothers in months. But will sit on a barstool and sob to strangers such strange confessions that no one knows what they are listening to, crimes or allegations. 

It is a well-funded, well-dressed, and quite sober seeming lie, nonetheless, money alone has never made anybody happy. Look at the lives of celebrities. Look at the lies of politicians. They hate their lives. Their words will deny, but look in their eyes, it is the terror of someone who has claimed their neighbor and called them their slave. There are conversations that happen in safe rooms where rich people say things that would bring a protest down on their ten acre lawn. We’ll forego the American letter-writing version, and go straight to la révolution française. They will never make it right because that requires confession and repentance. They will desire to quietly have things change and never admit their level of complicity in deciding large factions of us will live in perpetual poverty so that the few of them won’t have to look at their choices on their morning commute.

Fear has no muscle except grip. That’s why it’s easy to let it steer the ship. But it won’t let go when time comes. When that wind and ocean turns and that rudder doesn’t, there is no ship under fear’s control that can stand an instant against it.

They will not give it up. They have the government. But the people have the power. And no one wants to share what is only ours. When slaveowners had their say in the shape of our economy, they left their mark, to say the least. They ultra-defined the top and middle classes, but left the bottom dark and murky. There is no profit, not anything like we see today, without some form of slavery, without someone’s labor going unpaid. By people who can not feed their families or their selves without the work. Who have no free, accessible environment to survive in, only an economy, a few dollars buys something like dinner, two hundred pays the water’s bill. May not get to the rent this month.

I’m not being deep, or philosophical, or idealistic when I state, slavery. Our modern economy is a form of human trafficking. Because of the lack of any option to survive otherwise. If you want to live a full happy human life, outside of your government’s economy, where does that happen? On the land you’re taxed just for having? In a State or National Park where the wildlife has more rights than humans.

Freedom means living freely with no cost other than the effort required to access the resources required to sustain productive, fulfilling life. Food, water, shelter, hopefully from sources that naturally, or with a little assistance, replenish. If that option does not exist, then this is not freedom.

I can’t say it any more plainly. By definition, if the resources required for life (we die without them) cost money and are not available from any other naturally reoccurring source, then we are not free.

This is not a monopoly of a product. The crime I described here is the monopolization of the need.

Fear and Pride as Strengths

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Plants will hold up cups above their heads to catch bees in but bury their roots beneath the soil so that half the rain runs off before it soaks in. Trees will grow up tall and huge and heavy and spread out thick green sails from their oaken masts and dare the wind the topple them: perhaps they push the continent, perhaps it is why we still sail across the Atlantic, why California continues to be nibbled by the Pacific. If a human were a tree it would grow wide and flat close to the earth where no wind could tickle it. If a human were a plant, they’d put their bright colors beneath the ground in fear for anyone finding them. Lift their roots up to the elements so they can feed freely and never learn why their seeds bear no germ.

Singletary Lake

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

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.

All Out of Season

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

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.

The early morning doe

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

You imagine time rolls in the shiny black nostrils of an early morning doe. The scent in the air is not fresh, not breaking news. Days and weeks swirl headlong in the breeze. The smell of a dog comes out of the leaves. He hasn’t been here in a week. Still shoots her recent breath down and short white tail up and takes a shot in the dark. Not under-afraid, but over-prepared and highly aware of all things where. She is. The squish of winter mud between black blades. Background passing cars. A slew of houses. The sanctuary of a cemetery. Safest place for a wild thing. Where the humans hide and the grass is greener this close to the other side. She knows. She smiles. Nibbles green heads off Sable Mayberry’s earth bed. White pearls draped over exposed collar bones. The doe leaves off black pearls of her own. Still hunting. Over the bones of Dean Perry and Gavin Broome. Both avid deer hunters in their time. Their eternal dirt duvets just soaked in deer urine. You imagine she smells the black powder on their bare knuckles. The flesh of her ancestors where it betrayed them in their rotting frames. The scent of the dogs that crowded their beds and licked their heads. Long dead. Resurrected in the nose of a doe. 

The slimy afterlife of scent. The nose knows. The deer doesn’t. 
The amazing superpower of the past: to whisper what’s coming.

The Hive (part 4 – conclusion)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

It’s not complicated. It’s philosophy. It’s storytelling. We’re telling and teaching a bad story under the apologetic guise of clunky, who-really-knows truth. If you don’t just say no to an idea that unsettles a few other stones in the foundation, I can tell you the real story. But if you say no, you can go to the garden, seed for yourself. You’ll find the universe there. And it will show you the way it wants to be treated. 

To make a long story short, you’ll see your true nature like looking at your face in a clear mirror. We are not aliens. We are not demi-gods. If there were a bee, looking for ideas, collecting memories instead of honey, little globs of sticky pollen thoughts clinging the folded ridges of the pink fatty hive in our minds, the honeycombed shape of our brains, that is who we are.

We figured out cities from eating termites. Carpentry from them and even maggots, family from the wolves. We’re not warriors. We’re peace-finders, benefactors, between creatures who never ever shared anything before us. I’ve seen the lamb lie down beside the wolf. Literally. I’m not saying it was easy. But that’s our superpower. Our gravity. We call it learning, or thinking, or imagination maybe.

But really we’ve just spent the last fifteen thousand years filling up the hive.

Stalking #oldpoems

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Mountain dandelions are different than ones back home.
They make fluffy yellow flowers look like housecats. Not lions at all.
Yellow fringed and orange centered with green eyelashes all around.
Roar pollen in the wind. Dig in the leftovers of a billion years.
Root like pigs. Deep into hard gray lichen coated ground.
Creep throughout a lawn and launch on eyes like prey
where they mindlessly graze

across the hazy dome that crowns sleepy towns.

Grow low, stooped heads.
Warn us off, and keep us walking.
There are lions in the tall grass.
And just like dandelions.

They’re stalking.

The Final Frontier

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The future we imagine for ourselves in science fiction and culture in general, is probably two thousand years away. Our final frontier is still right here in front of us. Would you like to know how many times I’ve explained how chickens lay an egg every day to fully grown people who have eaten them their entire lives. Or the necessity of pollination to people more comfortable believing their plants aren’t producing because they read their Farmer’s Almanac the wrong way and not the product called insecticide they and their neighbors dumped all over their gardens. All vegetables and fruits are byproducts of a kinky inter-species three-way that’s been going down for the last one hundred and thirty million years. Our planet is a whole other sort of billionaire. We aren’t descended from monkeys. But we are clearly mammals. There’s no arguing that, we’re already trading milk with one another, dabbling in raising one another’s children. Clearly human beings are a part of a massive extended family. We’re all bound by the same rules and needs.

We’ve exhaustively answered the question of how a creature can know it all and understand nothing. We can’t do that another two thousand years. We’ll extinct ourselves long before that.

We don’t understand the earth we stand on. For example, you’re not sitting upright right now. Think about where you are on a globe. You’re jutted out sideways slightly down or some other absurd direction, depending on where you are. And you’re spinning and flying through space. And if you dig deep enough, you’re actually floating on a giant terraform raft bobbing up and down on the fat Santa belly of lava that gives our planet its rosy cheeks and cheery disposition, also our mind-boggling magnetic force-field that shields us from a constant bombardment of solar radiation that surrounds us, so much so one could describe a Solar System in terms of planets that exist within the outer atmosphere of their sun. Think about this, we’re being pulled and held by a gravity that extends outward from a central point within the earth. It pulls us, as it radiates out, and pulls and holds the moon, while still going out to tickle comets and asteroids into buzzing close by us. How the hell does gravity reach with a force that only attracts.

How does gravity extend outward while pulling inward, how long can intelligent life forms live on a planet before they committedly seek to understand it, before they break the hypnotic lifeless species-wide stare into the dingy fun-house mirror of our own incestual, violent, derisive and divisive cultural memory, our naval gazing religions, our self-obsessed youth worshiping. I’m fine with all of it as long as we understand, really know the story behind where chickens come from, how eggs are formed, long before we develop species-wide nutritional dependency on them. Water tables and topsoil. Constellations and art. Anyone who has really known a single acre of land has dabbled in this pursuit we call the future.

The final frontier. Only it isn’t out there. It’s the next two thousand years.
We need to learn how to really live here.
We need to understand our current way of life was shaped out of fear.
We need the sort of breakaway only a quiet life in the country can afford.
Go back to the very first drawing board.
The wilderness you’re at war with otherwise called your backyard.
I’m here to tell you, what you’re really fighting is a farm.