Less Than All Furry Silences
The intentions of trees are a form
of loneliness we climb like a ladder,
while love is resentment in scuba gear,
my death blinking furiously underwater.
Yesterday, my head was vast and hovering,
but today you tell me it’s all up to my shoes?
I will avoid puncturing another stone, now
that I know who lives inside. I’m innocent,
but cumulus. The rainforest never told me
I was not welcome to the mahogany. Oxygen
aside, I had the distinct feeling that its parrots
were busily dreaming me into their blue ideas
of monstrous. My pants have emergency
settings. They must be constantly adjusted.
Still, complicated crickets texture me, brush
me with their electronic dashes clippered
to bits by the clicking of chitinous robots—
canned applause in the rub of Velcroed legs.
The staccato trumpets of a Sousa marching band
tripping their high-stepping stars into a shredder
in triplicate find this poem not wearing its poem
hat. To unpuzzle this, question death, unscrew left,
then improvise a rhinoceros in charge of nosebleeds.
My Sigmund Freud action figure strikes a stiffer pose,
sucks on its cigar, suggests I’d best submit
to less than all furry silences. My potted fern
Fred agrees, since most smoking plants admire
only the bravest of trees. Unfronded humans,
beings of a much lower order, wear only words—
spacious scribbles fixed in tercets. Spiral fractures.
|