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Elizabeth Mar 2015
Paddling my ****** canoe down the whispering waters
With my fishing rod in hand,
I acknowledge the persevering tree buds,
The attention seeking trilliums,
Dazzling all eyes and intoxicating logocentric thinkers.
The perch and bluegill aim to impress my lures,
And wish to give my martyrdom-like worms salvation in the highest sense.
Into the ocean I proceed, jumping ship to swim the length of my beaches,
My spaces of leisure and relaxation.
The May flies clench my shirt in their microscopic fists,
Dropping me cleanly into the nook of the reading tree,
Where I monkey-swing down through the branches,
Onto my napping hammock-
This I cannot call my own, but I act as such.
Yet before I drift,
And the sun begs for bedtime,
I climb, dog leash in hand,
To the top of my mountain,
Where I coo our Star to sleep
And bid the moon good morning.
But too quickly does my rule end of these kindled nights,
As another power swoops up under my running shoes,
At the same time blanketing me in my parka,
My cave until the kayaks hum and vibrate again.
My mountain sheeted in snow,
I resort to observing this complete different beauty
Through the hood of my oversized coat,
While from above my ski poles click into their fitted sockets on my hands,
The only way left to triumph over this land mass I call my own.

For me these seasons progress too quickly,
Yet been it this way for centuries.
Mother Nature shows off her powers as she extinguishes my campfire
With a wintery gust of thinning atmosphere,
And little do the birds complain as they frantically scratch at every remaining frost-lacking beetle.
Life goes on just as planned
While the Does and Coyotes huddle for warmth in their newly knitted sweaters.
In a 2013 study, human scientists wished to know
The depths of the heart of the common rat,
And devised an experiment to prove that
Empathy can exist even in the smallest of creatures.

The scientists, in their logocentric wisdom
Born out of centuries of Western philosophical tradition,
Metaphysical assumption, and scientific methodologies,
Trapped one rat in a tightly confined space and watched.

To their small-minded astonishment, the rats performed,
Again and again, the role of savior to their fellow rat.
They did this without need for compensation or compulsion
And, if given, shared the reward with their de-caged brethren.

But what the scientists failed to realize is, as is often the case,
That they themselves, with all their complex cognitive capacity,
Had failed an experiment which the rats navigated with ease.
For it was them who had caged the rat, and rats who set them free.
Lawrence Hall Mar 2021
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                       Robin Hood and Jacques Derrida

As the first stars came out above the leaves
Of Merry Sherwood, the lads in peaceful repose
Put away their after-supper mending of gear
And idled over their ale of October brewing

Then Robin Hood spoke to Allan-a-Dale:

Don’t sing to us of Neo-Post-Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchal People-of-Color Matriarchal LGBTQTY Non-Binary Feminist Chomskian Existentialist (existentialist – how quaint) Hegelian Post-Structuralist Logocentric Sausurian Psychoanalytical Post-Modern Marxist Jungian New Critical Cognitive Scientific Neo-Anarchic Canon-Repudiationist Neo-Informalist Catarrhic De-Constructionism.

Sing to us
                                                       a story.
A poem is itself.

— The End —