Take One

If I were a bird only
with one song I wanted
to perfect, one tuned

bell to toll about
a river coursing near
or the echo

drawing closed the shape
of something I meant to keep
to remind me...

My ears are overfull
with froth and loam and bees
busy with the sound

of steadfast looking away
blinking into the distance
holding one note

between one hand
for all the flights
I will not take

Doubt. Toilet. Fascination. Table.

There was a time when I understood
more or less as everyone else I knew.
I wanted what we wanted. I was what
we were. Now, not so much but maybe
now, moreso maybe. Like a baby ten feet
tall, wrestling atoms - "Please stay!"

The world and I think of ants and how
for some few there is enough about them
to interest us though the news is bad.
These ants, you see, are made of fire
and they are burning legs of dogs and
folks like us. How would we feel?
How do we feel? Lost in a sea of
ants. Swarming with flame. Eaten alive.
So that we become ants. What was
us now incorporated into ants.

Not the soul, some voice clambers loudly
with hammers bang bang not the soul!
The conviction strident beyond rumor
crusted over with religion and what mom said.
Shh. A hiss. The look.
I'm too afraid not to believe.
All seems reasonable, really, until you ask.
Until the snake comes whispering
questions mom did not want to hear
emerge from my lips. It's all dangerous.
Atoms especially and their silly children

And out there already (not now)
I am not doing this work, instead I'm
mouldering back into separate particles,
disseminating out into the world because
one day I knew what to do and began.

what I would have

you
       without
                    the shakes
       without
                    the snakes
       without
                    the wine

no thing is ever in a poem what

it is

its shape dictates

otherwise. See these words are

colorful

athletic

wrought

in their endeavor, not trapped

which is how I would

have said it in

any

other

form

Let Freedom Ting

You hear all the time that "freedom isn't free". I'm not looking for anyone to explain what is meant by these words. I think I understand that what they mean to say, but don't have the time nor inclination to elucidate, is that our lifestyle that we (don't really) enjoy is supported by our military's ability to forestall anyone else coming to insert themselves in our place. My experience of being able to walk to work and sit in a chair and in front of a glowing screen and walk back to my warm, safe home full of food and many, many wonderful amenities and set my wide ass down on a cushy couch and safely watch tragedies unfold (in living color) to other people in other places goes on without bombs and gunfire and militias disappearing my neighbors in the middle of the night. For this I am sometimes grateful, if I am not currently caught up in my own dramas.
But back to the mantra, "freedom isn't free" (nearly always introduced by the word "because")...how is it that we accept this phrase and assign it such pendulous weight and gravity, so much so that to even argue anything about it, as I am attempting to do here, brands me as some sort of anti-American? I just want to put down here that this is an idiot's phrase, vapid and meaningless. If freedom is not free, then it cannot be freedom. How much did anyone pay to exist again? Right. We are thrust into life from what we cannot know. (Perhaps we pay on the other side of life, but actual intel on this subject is suspiciously lacking.)
Freedom is free. Our right to unsustainable use resources that most of the rest of the world wants isn't free and requires the blood of our brothers and sisters to sustain.
May the god of your insecurities hold and coddle you, may he make up a face for you and encourage you to worship it, and may he make up solid reasons for you to use to continue not to evolve and realize that you are your own god and more, for that thought is troubling to you.