Essences May Be Left or Carried

We don’t walk. We can’t far.
We try to understand
All you walking writers—

The many novelists,
Poets, especially
Essayists—the flâneurs

And the nature writers.
We sort of understand
What you seek and enjoy

On your rambles with us,
A few of us at least,
On the tips of your tongues,

In your minds and pockets.
We try to understand
What you mean by us, but

We can’t. We would prefer
To wait here while you walk
And watch what you can’t see,

How the world looks without
You in it, strolling through.
Return, we might tell you.

As an Antithesis of an Anthesis

Cringing yet? We can do that
To you, you who invest us
With all the conventional

Meanings we are. Flowers bloom,
Anthesis. Then flowers wilt,
Antithesis. Szymborska,

Poem punning on negatives,
Named life as the storm before
The calm. Cringing, yes. But, yes.

Some Questions for the Well-Prepared

So the few of you own property
In the mountains, in your secret spot,
With a private spring, solar panels,

Biometric safe, guns and ammo,
Food with multi-year shelf life stockpiled,
Maybe a greenhouse, plenty of fuel,

Does the waiting ever get to you?
Do you worry your lives will run out
And you will end before the world ends?

Do you feel tethered to your bug-out,
Afraid to get too far from safety,
A quick race to your hole in the rock?

What if the sky burns? What if wildfires
Burn the woods around you, fill your air
With choking ash? Do you have a cave?

Would you want to live your last years there?
And last of all, what if you succeed,
A few older people, fewer young,

On top of a pile of safes, cans, guns,
No idea who else is left out there,
Nothing to do but dig in and wait

For each of you to reach your own end
Anyway, up there on the mountain
In your Eden of Apocalypse?

The Death by Drowning of a Child Named Bettany

Happened only in a dream
But was a shock in the dream,
As dream shocks always are.

Despite everything, no one
Knows why dream emotions are
What they are—fleeting, intense,

Disorienting, haunting.
In the same dream as the death
Of the girl who thought she would

Be rescued if she fell in
The water, a jagged phrase
Kept surfacing, a fragment,

Something contrasting freedom
To power that the mind grasped
Hard but couldn’t hold, then this—

You can quit a little bit.
You can quit a lot of it.
You don’t have to surrender.

Eat, Shit, Split, Repeat

Life goes on. It shrinks. It grows.
But on it goes. Death goes, too,
Along for the ride, along

With all the rest of life. Eat,
Shit, Split, Repeat. Each piece fails,
But the whole has never ceased.

This would make you happier,
If you didn’t see yourself
As just a piece. Some people

Have used culture’s expertise
To try to think of themselves
As really contiguous

With all of it. I am that.
Look for me under your boots.
The sum is always constant.

And so forth. All life’s all one,
But you aren’t, and you won’t be.
You’ll weren’t. Eat, shit, split, repeat.

You will not repeat with it.
Something’s got to give, for life
To go on living, but look,

Pity your bones, not your soul.
Pity what you are, not who.
It’s going to hurt. It hurts

Half the time already, but
You won’t be forced to go on
With it. Life eats, shits. Yous split.