How to break an addiction. Decide to live.
What can I learn from my pain. Danger.
And friends are merely friendly, live on independent
of your injury. You will not be missed in church on Sunday.

Grass. ****, broccoli, burrito, stink, ***, skunk.
I'm talking blue grama, upland bent, smooth brome,
riverside panic, wild rye, fowl meadow, spike muhly,
sweet vernal, salt marsh, bristly foxtail, little bluestem.

****** is unhealthy, opens lesions in the brain,
wormholes into hell, yet should be legal. I'll vote that way.
It may ease the pathos into non-existence
well as meditation, bird watching, last will and testament.

Each joint hurts, rib joints, spine joints, skull plate joints.
The head and hip and heart will hurt, all three.
Insomniac I like the way bones crack and clack like
wooden wind chimes, an untuned piano, a tree rack of wornout
      shoes.

Never forget, the mind is the body paying attention
to what it's doing. Without that connection, each finger bent
or toe smashed is just added to the collection
of anonymous body parts of holocaust victims

in their mass graves. Better when every life saved
or lost is a front page story, an illusion of shared
sacrifice or joy, but that expresses only the surface
of our emotions. I'm mostly relieved to have survived.

Prairie In The Wind
Here in April,
the prairie wind at my back
while white clouds mottle scarce
new grass, I hold in my hand
what has stayed in the jacket for all
the long months since November
Seeds carried through cold times
since that dark day I stripped them, waiting,
from rusty plumes in my fence line;
Turkey Foot, Big Red, Blue Bluestem-
names for an old and simple grass saved
from the plow. Most I scattered on earth far
removed, scratched a shallow bed before the frost
These few are left, a pocket legacy, warning me,
a bit of prairie to seed that other earth
I hold inside my mind

Prairie In My Pocket

Here in April,
the prairie wind at my back
while white clouds mottle scarce
new grass, I hold in my hand
what has stayed in the jacket for all
the long months since November
Seeds carried through cold times
since that dark day I stripped them, waiting,
from rusty plumes in my fence line;
Turkey Foot, Big Red, Blue Bluestem-
names for an old and simple grass saved
from the plow. Most I scattered on earth far
removed, scratched a shallow bed before the frost
These few are left, a pocket legacy, warning me,
a bit of prairie to seed that other earth
I hold inside my mind