NATURE POEM

Bread is made to sustain life
Bricks are laid to contain a garden

I saw the garden and its bark-colored buds
I saw the strip malls and the big box stores

Traffic patterned into a clover 
On a new road with a petroleum stink

You were in cahoots with the weather
Rain painted on your face

Sadness doesn’t modify living
It is its method

Bread is ruined by too much attention
Brickwork by not enough

I saw the face you show the mirror
Dread steamed off of you

I was more tired than a mom
I was a conspiracy of tired

I caught my fall in an armpit
More or less

I saw the opposite of a garden
I saw the future

LANDSCAPE WITH HYDRAULIC FRACTURE

Dead heads of flowers make for winter 

interest. When I behold the etherized 

babes, I recognize what I live inside as 

a system of indifference. I know methods 

of extraction. I know the gists. If the earth 

trembles or is contaminated, it is only a 

rhyme with an original gesture. It is only 

as sad as the saddest bugle sounding out 

across a great distance. Toward stadiums 

cheering for interference. Black cat in the 

end zone, snake in the dugout. Grant me 

a brown bouquet of seasonal profligacy, 

a tourniquet for futility. Woe to the un-

planted world, crashing through the substrate.

ENGINE OF WHAT

I close my eyes in the wrongness of the ordinary

World of brutal miracle, haunted place

I keep pace with whatever’s the matter

A pattern becomes a problem like a chick becomes a hen

When I need a new idea, I go to the lap of a tree

Green like a casino on a Saturday night

Stars turn out to be systems of clocks

Today can be accomplished in little increments

Inclement weather is the new standard

And it can stand in for the concept of time

Auld lang syne again, wow

What if people have something in common