"strange"
                                                 is declared
                                                  of person
                                         who rationalizes
                                                that­ matter if
                                         non-human
                                         non-animal
                                         non-living
                                      merits recognition
                                      as being good
                                      on it's own

                                      but really      
                                         are we
                                         the ultimate stewards
                                               of absolute purpose?

                         what confirms                      our judgement

                                        in deeming what deserves
                                             to exist for it's own
                                             and what belongs
                                                 to our means
                                                           ­                 and ours alone?

                                      is it so fantastic
                                                  to suggest
                                      that by some means of
                                                           indefiniteness
                                                  ­of intangible
                                                                ­            comprehension
                                                all matter
                                       is fundamentally intertwined
                                               in the sense
                                            everything is stardust
                                             created by
                                                                ­   the universe's omnipotent hand?

                                      don't you
                                                 ever get the feeling
                                      inside of your conscious
                                                       ­           too?

                                      doesn't your awareness
                                               ever whisper
                                                   as a sentience
                                                you have an obligation
                                                from some unspoken contract
                                                    sign­ed before birth
                                                  to uphold the integrity
                                                  of everything
                                                  that­ inhabits this earth
                                                       whether or not
                                  it thinks in the way                                       you do?

                                      for what purpose
                                           we exist assembled into
                     abrupt                 profound               togetherness
                                      remains       ­      undecided

                                      earth's fabrications
                                                 will survive
                                               harmoniously
                                      but
                                will you
                 do the same?

Father, Father, where have you gone?
Where are your arms where we belong?
How far from these banks we’ve known
have you moved your kingdom’s throne?
Have you found another home?
Did you forget your children doomed to roam?
Is the family whole again?
New children where we should’ve been.

Father, Father, we’ve flown so far,
with neither guiding sun nor evening star.
Where did they go, where are our people?
We’ve lost a forest to gain a steeple.
We’ve knocked atop the hollow hills,
but could only hear the sound of mills.
Tell us if you slumber deep,
or if you’ve found a better sleep.

Father, Father, who are these men?
They dump waste into the river bend.
They say our people don’t exist,
but we see the faces in the mist.
We’ll sing one last haunting tune,
on tranquil waters ‘neath beaming moon.
We’ll sing goodbye to the world we knew
and go to die and be with you.

We march
Withering white
All seas to dust

The ground caves in
The earth grows hollow

Ribs through the skin
Teeth through the lips
Breath catching black

We march
In a ceaseless beat
To the rhythm of dead machines
Over cracked roads
And empty homes

Pt. 1
I am a clumsy giant
Oblivious to worlds below.

Outside, outside is so nice!
Awake, rejuvinate me!
Oh! The beauty!
Even the air is greener,
On the other side here
Oh living our lives indoors
Was an unhappy accident of genius
Oh to spend days with trees and grass!

-- A sudden stab. A pause.
Lifted leg reveals
Buried, ensnared in foot
Handsome bee,
Buzzing for escape
One more wriggle
And it's gone. To die.

Oh! Back we go we go!
To hide from the cruel world!
Away from bees
And wasps and stings
Such mildly inconvenient things.
- And off the bee went to die.


Pt. 2*
Such short lived pain for me
Is death for one of the hive

This wound I lament
Will heal so shortly
Yet its cause
Will surely die

The life the cost
A life is lost!
Yet my pain is all I can see

Hives collapse
Honey ramsacked!
They're fed with sugar tea

Pesticidal pollen
Oh ain't disease rotten!
The strife of the honey bee.

I am a clumsy giant...

skin burnt,
blistered and charred,
hair scorched to the
naked flesh beneath.
cracked hands bleeding;
make enfeebled attempt to
obscure disfigured face—
hiding from onlookers' gaze the
shame of such pain.

a world set aflame,
the inferno a scheme
by heat and by
fire, amidst
swirling orange spires,
the landscape through force
taken at desire.

an ape once great,
gentle regality
reduction by immolation,
magnificence squandered,
now moulded to ash,
an animal sacrifice—a victim of
act without consequence consideration,
to appease devilish demand,
the culinary Palm to
grace the malefactor's hand.

nature's innocence course set—damnation,
if not new mind found.
a power,
the fortitude and will
to exorcise this demon—
this demon
known as man.

A human habit universal,
our measure of success by possessions to envy.
An infernal curse—commercial purveyors, trinkets
of gold and gem,
shining blinking, fabrics glistening;
the value of thing manipulated by
them insect kings.

By lion's fang and butterfly guise they rule,
a hubris deceiver upon their shoulder
obscuring their likeness to those
serfs upon whom they
cunningly demand servitude, otherwise
be starved, put out, forced to watch their
future falter—sons and daughters
failing in flight, their
wings clipped prior first spanning.

Locust clans spurred to fight over resources, who
sell and buy back nature's bounty once
formed anew into advertisement's subject.
Oceans emptied of fish, forests becoming myth,
uplands turned to wastelands,
abomination fog a spherical prison choking
earth's inhabitants—the marketer's dowry
paid for marriage to a precarious economy.
Royalty made rich at cost of labouring spine,
but worse—
our home and thereby our hope we consign.

By their futile attempt to survive,
the locust instinct to consume,
until all is gone we contrive,
the inevitable a meet with our doom—kings
with stained glass wings to follow soon.
So small are we amidst this vast existence;
the ambitions of men
barely bigger than an insect's significance.

Between the first and last
Nothingness, before the cry of Men
I feel the silence of centuries

When Earth was occupied by
A fathomless zero of eternity
A tulip temple of wakeless night

Dawns and sunsets gone uninterrupted
Before the tardy suffering of mortality
That mute featureless unknown

Of absolute patience is, prolonging
The quantum observation of creation
The kind slumber of a million suns

Jewelled dreams of nameless movement
Before symbol, idea, language, innovation
And before fire, war, cities, desire, wealth

All that makes men beasts and unspiritual
I feel the shadows spinning, entry of souls
The heavy cosmic rest before another cycle

One spirit sole of creation ready to rise again
Yet another species to make their disillusioned grin
Their stamp upon resources, upon history

To force the world’s blind necessity
To arise with the glamour of the flesh
And make the worlds shudder with man made scars.

And then I too
am part of the silence
that casts its post-sunset stillness
throughout this swamp white oak's great spread.

It seems as though even the hive of honeybees
and the nearby nest of baby birds
have stopped to admire
the feeling of the world
tilting on its axis; sinking through space.
We all gaze further upwards,
those bees and birds and I.
And nestled in the remaining twigs above,
is the shockingly finite dance
of the leaves... of the stars.

The shadows that hang from the top-most branches
cast their way down around me
and coat their way all over the ground, making it
easy to forget the height—
the ultimate suspension. Because
born within my skin
is a swamp white oak,
stretching its branches through the
grey matter in my mind,
over-taking and over-whelming.
At the end of it all is me:
a tiny little acorn laid
by an impossible evolution
of people into trees.

Every cell becomes leaf and
the heart a listening ear. Amongst
the chorus of the frogs,
the owls, the coyotes—
the chorus of the woods around—
is that shift
so revered.
The shift of the Earth.
The Earth tilting
on its axis.
It’s time to admit that the maps and
man’s little green boxes there,
are nothing but products
of a continually
diminishing temper... showing
that when this swamp white falls,
it won’t just be a wood
that’s finally left barren.
It won't just be a body
left emptied and charred.

Please, I think, as the bark gets flimsier
and flimsier
beneath my feet. As the wind gets fiercer
and fiercer
howling in my ears. *Please. Let this lone acorn
standing here
sprout into something.
Let a swamp white oak
be seen.

What if,
instead of shooting
people into space,
we grew our way there?
What if,
we built tree forts in trees,
so that we could plant trees
in the tree forts,
and when they grow,
build more forts
in those trees and
continue that process
while adding gardens
all along the way
along with more tree forts
for everyone to live in
and everything would be connected
to form a living structure
that continually grew around us
as we continually grew within it
and our atmosphere would
expand
to encompass an amount of space
that we could have never imagined,
and we would grow with the trees
stronger, sturdier, and healthier
rather than continually
contract
and thin by thickening the pollution
in the space within our atmosphere
as we die with the trees
weak, withered, and dis-eased?