Though you've barely had a ramble
are no wayward canine daddy of note
that brief encounter in our brambles
has left the experts fearing a cancerous growth

So we starve you of your pine nuts and bacon rinds
so we can feed you anaesthetic
and betray you to the thief of time
only to make you, I imagine, feel pathetic
And you often so full of life's exasperate scurry

I worry
will the shine stray from your eyes
those hazel pools of so much of
my feeling mature, just for
pertaining to a creature's care

 we all seem in too much of a hurry
to stifle what little spirit
that surrounds us
to wear
down on every minor aspect
of childish delight
in this silent sacrament
of the aging process
and with arguably years
of your fatherhood left
in the very ***** some dry eyed savant
decides it correct we should tamper with

Tomorrow I will snuggle you in favoured, bouncy eiderdowns
that will blanket your unknowing
and treat you as if
you were an eastering child
on cured hams and other saltiness
after you awaken
from those strangest enforcements of sleep
and through our eyes we will trade more secrets to keep

And we will hope, as we only can, that it was for the best
For you, Yorkshire's son, or Sheringham's
And consider with all of your
exhuming breath
That we meddled, stilling over life
To cheat a slightly delayed death.

All that could warn fell flat.
I heard your story, saw your eyes.
Taken back by it’s depths.
The long tunnel eyes, I thought,
could see me back.

I can't find my red flags!

Now I’m shaken with embarrassment.
Sick with silliness I don’t even believe in.
An evil, baffled laugh: your detachment.

How did I get this far?
Your broken rib cage split open.
I saw heart!
Caught.
A snow covered bear trap.

I don’t know why I’m here, or why I’m maimed.
The ghost dances again, and again.
Who are these people you’re pinning me up against?
Does it give you solace?

And you wouldn’t release me?
Articulate it, please, why shouldn’t I go?
This cage still carries the remains of the last doe!
She prances around - but
In your head
And in mine.

Imagine another time, and another,
it’ll be their dime, not yours, remember?
Here, Instead, how about we craft them together?
I’ll be yours, and you’ll be mine.
Projecting fantasy.
No persons, just loud symbols,
and a lot of real time.

How could you be so broken up about your own false dillusion?
How could you be so hurt that a human was, after all, a human.

Alas, after even this, I couldn't find them.

The sick joke is as sick as it can get.
Let’s just admit it.
This time, not hers, or yours, but my wings be split.
The individual who has been there through all of it.

Fashion together
Passing checklists of bias
it, not she, is close enough!
And I’ll be there to make sure you’ve got it.

Justification comes like a plague
I’ll forever hold my peace.
You would too.
You know you would, too.

You will see it, your creation, and it will be good.
No Holy Other could tell you otherwise.
No difference between yours and His! Right?

They have to be the one this time!
Take them in their prime.

And so I see through this glass dimly lit:
An individual to cup my lonely *******?
Just take me. This whimsical gem.
“I trust you, oh man on the farm, I trust you!”

You saw my fruit,
saw that it was good. Good to eat.
Soil that was warm an inviting.

And for years now you’ve been safe.
Safe and well fed.
You’ve traipsed the land.
But never owned it.
My early labor hidden.

There was nothing to stop it.

"What good land! Better than ever seen!"
“But what other field am I missing?”

A treasure revealed that was not ripen.
Seed dew moist with shaking burden,
A violent exposition.
You wonder why this fruit is so bitter?

I thought I could trust the hands, and what’s seen.
But they pealed open the rose bud and destroyed the flower.
Now my eyes will see as far as my roots go.

My new myopic.

The ***** will ****, and they will, too.
With devices that stick like sand-spurs.
Crafty.
We move but we don’t know why or where to.
So crafty.

In my naiveté I trusted the prudent deceit
and we both walked in an illusory state.
In my naiveté I trusted the naive!
And saw more then I’d ever seen!

You don’t know where you’re going,
So why resent me?

I am a stranger seen through a window dimly lit.
I welcomed you into this garden:
You scrambled and fit.

Madness unbridled.
“No, this isn’t it!”

******! I can’t find my red flags!
Just a needle and some thread.

Why am I here?
Come what mend?!

You came, ripped up what I knew of myself,
An inkling, with no defense.

Oh that my Master would come back
to His field and see what has been maimed:
The man on the farm and the flower!

I’m grape vine rose bush.
You take hold and smear me!
Disappointed that your 28 years wouldn’t grow me.
To be wine, or sweet perfume.

Skipping across time lines and opportunities-
further detachment from the reality created.
World within worlds all based on lies, fear, and hurt.

I’m not what I am in a farmer’s hands!

Oh but one day you'll finally bow
to a lonely and thirsty plant.
Whose only hope is now eastering.

After the longest precession of my life:
an ending so abrupt.

Please just look back.
Purge the cage of bones, pedals, and raisins.
Find land, and love it.
Because what made this land so good
is the millions of little deaths
that fermented on the top of her skin
and given: a shaking burden.
Worth that can't be cheapened.

Just take care of her this time.

I’ll have closure then.
The bear trap, clean.
And the doe’s ghost, prancing.
I’ll know that what I’ve seen in your tiger eyes
wasn’t just me looking.

The young grape vine rose bush, pruned.
My red flags,
pushed them back into the soil,
and let go the thread and needle.

Which is my church with its green leaves, brown grass
and pine’s bark, all foresting in one motion.
I shall forest rituals of sacrifice,

but without Catholicizing faces drawn
from dark Crusading and my exiling.
Annaling to mark the sun’s solstice for Eastering
and holying days, the dew
coalescing upon the darkening and browning grass
at midnight and cooling air
arching constellations
and the mooning of the night: the cue
to lying for rest
by the small pool in this placing or
to strike, savaging at prey.

Owling as it does, darting as it does,
from a bed of branches, crying,
soundlessly shooting at a forest mouse, leaves
rustling for this night’s Nativity,
this one lifts its butterflying wings
like the soul’s silhouette
taken by an angeling force to heaven.
After owling, angeling, butterflying,
one must create Jesus as a verb.

Having witnessing these things,
limits are paining, as are knowings and doings.
The mouse must have been distracting
this owl from its offspring, thus it was Christing:
sacrificing itself for its children, thus fathering.

Seeing angels fluttering under the moonlight,
Hairshirting is my Church after living here,
after travelling through East of Eden in daylight.
  
Simplifying the Word---so heartwrenching---near
dawn or dusk, being as a penumbra’s cusp
I am Giotto’s halo in human form, keeper

of the haze, smoke, storm, and most of all, cup
from my own despairing.

Always there more to God than pain.

Churching myself is my work, thus by expressing
this foresting, owling, angeling, butterflying,  
I narrate my life’s kingdom.
Only beautiful words for my Beatrice, Florence,
and re-Edening.