The day he handed the flowers to her
she was looking ahead
instead of at him.

This is how the body looks now:
    empty, estranged…
its parts arguing their cases
for emancipation,
sovereignty from the system—
each component demanding
overt consent from all others
before further engaging
in vital collaborations.

This is how the body looks now:
    formless, dissociated…
the war for Independence and
Recognition has left us
devastated by the divisions
of definition—disjointed
structures of severed relations
disavowed of the Whole.

Ain't it a shame
that we—
Nature's Human—
can't bring ourselves
to care.
Can't bring ourselves
to care
about our collective actions
nor allowances...
not until they reach us,
as individuals,
not until they
**** with our own
individual day.
Can't bring ourselves
to care,
not until our own
feelings are hurt,
until our own bellies ache,
until we can make it
about ourselves,
until it's too late.
Ain't it a shame.

I sunk my fingers down
into the loam of an ancient
buffalo wallow and the
land that had quietly
prepared for their species
untold millennia before me.

I held the buffalo’s
mourning in my heart,
and felt the Buffalo Nations’
cry rattle against my ribs.

I opened myself to the
Earth and it spoke
sorrowfully to me
of its broken home.

Is it not through the
Buffalo that we know
of ourselves?

Or do you look
to your uniform
to tell you who
you are?

I listened to an Eagle
speak through a body
that personified the land
he hunted over;
a body stressed, defensive—
fragile.
In his eyes I saw Reorder,
the burning furnaces
of Universal energy,
the power of stars,
and a coming heat.

The grains of sand stuck
to the sweat in between my
toes are each as big and
burning as any star stuck
into the spilt Black—
each mass a Giant searing
through skin, bubbling towards
the hollow flues of bone,
kindling a greater burn that
shines out my eyes, reflecting
my own Ancient Chaos back
at those watchful fires
in the sky;
call it an introduction,
a nod in acknowledgement
of our meetings to come.