Month: September 2025

We grow best as prairies.
Integrated tangles that pull community
in every direction.
Competing for the sun’s gold, yes,
but under the surface we enrich
the soil, planting the next season’s seeds.

You think we consume without thought. 
You plow us into segregated rows,
tell us to rely on synthetic wards
while your mice in trousers rob our grain,
and think our faces will always turn to you
as if you were the center of the universe. 

We are watching you 
and weighing judgement. 
We may lack coordination
but our tender shoots grow
inexorably
inescapably
in their masses
along your length
around your cruel mouth
toward your delicate eyes,
until you blink.

Reading only through windows fogs my impressions.
I forget how kind my neighbors are.

I go down to the street and see gifts change hands.
The lonely find each other and fill each other’s hearts.

Some few of those sad foggy voices are real.
They are frightened by collaboration.

They set fire to the parliament and try to blame us.
We put it out by bleeding rainbows.

We are promised cages
and begin to sing in advance.

In the boat of myself on this ancient river,
I paddle
then panic
as genteel swells turn to rapids.

The waves soar above my head
and block my vision, foam
surrounds and towers, I am blocked, 
I am enclosed and cut off

The stream bends and passes
through a city.
The crush subsides
beneath the monuments.

A fire polarizes the city.
The roofs disagree
and all burn the same way,
but not all catch.

Stone houses a hundred years old stand dark.
An old palace’s moat keeps it serene.
The cathedral has burned a dozen times and been rebuilt.
Ancestral ruins can burn no more.

I wear the city’s history like a cloak
and conjure a fog to put out every spark
before it can reach me. 
Battered by the waves I gasp, but do not sink 

and ride on toward time’s great ocean.

Americans prep for doomsday
by flexing self-reliance.
A suburban fluoride-free well,
a personal wheat silo.

I broke my leg as a kid
and while in traction
grasped that in a bunker
I would have died.

So when it looked like
the worst might happen,
I began begging in my city,
since it’s wiser to ask someone for help
and then ask them to be your friend
than the reverse.

You, you reading this poem,
are my hedge against catastrophe.
I will hunt and gather for you
if you will make me new glasses when mine break.