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i segregate separate stratify
my poems with little lines
to keep them apart,
keep them from bleeding
into one another like
frames in a poorly inked comic strip.
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it doesn't work.
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as water vapor
excited by evaporation
and
exalted by the elevation,
wishing to remain in the clouds.

but the float is fleeting
and eventually a rain will fall.
with it the water,
so enlightened by the episode,
will return to the surface
as it was before
but somehow new.

to remember but never miss being a gas,
understanding the evanescence of effervescence.

there are no
treasures for the timid.
nothing accomplished
by trepidation.
no such thing as
logical caution either.
pragmatism is a pompous *******.
fear is always fear,
subjectively irrational
and
subject to scrutiny.

more often than not
to fail holds more glory
than to fear.

a stomach of gravel
and teeth of chalk.
it was never
supposed to be
easy or fun.

our burdens are
what build us.
the gift is
the curse.

just,
ask the jellyfish.
he'll tell you,
life ain't easy.
life's a challenge.
may not be able to fight the tide
but there's plenty else to grapple with.
that's what he said,
the five percent of him
that wasn't water.

and here we stand with spines.
maybe still can't fight the tide
but theres plenty that we can.

what is the range
of these ripples
that set forth as
i skip across life's lake.
unseen to me,
upon what shores
will wash my
wave bound wake.

in the soup
vegetable is meat
as meat is vegetable.
such are we
in this world
dripping like mucus.
endless fluid contact,
breathing the same
air that has been
breathed for millenia.

slowly releasing our pigment
into the swirl of things,
this spin-art world.
everybody's got their own color
and we can't help but mix them.

like a tube of paint
without a top
dropped in a bucket.
the living color erupts,
it permeates the outside.

dissipates but never disappears.

like blood in the sink
swirling with substance,
vibrant and brilliant.

the thin stretch of life
dissolves slowly to clear.
becoming, not nothing,
but less of something
and part of more.

goes down the drain,
but where from there?

and so life makes life.
the strange beauty
of pollination.
flowers allowing insects
to mediate, relegate, perpetrate
and consummate their ancient ritual,
their sacred act of reproduction.
A third party multispecies **** of sorts.
But the bees never get off.
still,
truly takes the task a touch further
than the innumerable sea animals
who mate in mass,
whole schools of fish
releasing egg and *****
anonymously
in a surging swarm of ***,
generating the next generation.
and so life makes life.

what frivolous fragility is a shore
always shifting, sailing, sinking,
both torn and squeezed
by equally opposite entities.
utter and ultimate dependence on
the continued relationship
between land and sea.