i.*   i've always loved the way the earth looks from an airplane window, small enough that i can filter through an entire city with my fingers and never encounter a single face that inhabits it. but this time, i looked out and could see nothing but green for miles. it was as if god himself could put his infinite hands together and they would still fill with trees and branches and coffee-stained rivers instead of people. i didn't know it was possible to drown in so much color.

ii.   a man who spoke in splintered english and carried a machete told me that he could survive in the rainforest for a month without supplies, that the jungle ran through his bloodstream as he imagined gasoline and city lights flickered through mine. the day he took us hiking on the trails, he glided through the understory barefoot, pausing just long enough each time to see if we were keeping up.

iii.   some mornings, i lay in bed still wishing i could turn the chorus of car horns outside my window into the songs of howler monkeys echoing across the treetops and into my dreams.

iv.   at night, we walked down a beach, dragging sand and weariness in our socks and watching the waves crest along the shore. i looked to my right and the stars leaned so close into the forest that they simply became twinkling electric lights atop palm tree lampposts. my feet even tasted the stars beneath them; when i kicked up sand, tiny constellations startled scurrying ***** into the tide.

v.   you will always be the first country that trusted me with a bottle in my hand, as i stole through the midnight streets of san pedro with the taste of *** mixing in with the laughter i felt hidden under my tongue. and in the morning, i awoke to a faint dizziness and the memory of boys who bought me drinks and asked for nothing more than a dance and a handful of stories in return.

vi.   *muy exótica, they murmured as i walked down the road, my heartbeat syncing with the wheels of my suitcase as they rolled over the uneven dirt. a pair of enamored scarlet macaws held no magic for them now; the real exotic specimen was the girl whose almond eyes were filled with desert sand, whose skin only became mocha when the sun stared at it too long. they couldn't turn away.

vii.   i still have countless bug bites that dance across the backs of my legs in tingling trails. i hope the scars stay long enough for me to trace them back to the place where they were choreographed.

viii.   only one of a thousand sea turtle hatchlings will reach adulthood, yet i watched one of eight make its way from my hand to the ocean until it caught the sunrise and disappeared. i kept my palm open as i waved goodbye, hoping he would someday be able to read his way back home.

ix.   the last night, we danced under a shower of stars and you told me about a time that you smoked until twilight and saw sea turtles dancing on the beach to bob marley. while we were sitting there wishing the storm would swallow up time, i imagined piro beach was littered with the shells of sea turtles using the moonlight as it pulsed off the waves to teach each other how to salsa too.

x.   i've never written a love song, but i spent my days in a hammock wishing i knew enough words in spanish to weave together one for costa rica. i wonder if i will spend my life falling in love with places and scattering pieces of my heart across the continents like turtle eggs without ever finding the one location i'd like to bury them deep into the sand and wait for life to dig its way back out.

Nicky, the neighbor’s dog, drags a road **** home.
A beautiful pelt like those fox shoulder garments women wore in the
      forties.
But the head is crushed beyond recognition—maybe it’s a fox and that’s
      why Nicky, a canine, is conducting this wake on our front lawn.

Loretta, my wife’s mother, is in the hospital again. Forty years of Crohn’s
      disease has finally broken her.
It may take some time but she won’t bounce back from this episode.
None of us are sorry to see her die, not even Loretta. There will be a
      thunderous downpour during her last hour.

I like the story about the nuns hitting Peg in school–contumacy is a sin.
Emile and Loretta considered it an inappropriate punishment for their
      cherished adopted daughter.
So they pulled her out of Catholic for public school. They did their own
      thinking about discipline.

Early Spring, peepers all night, then the birds take over at dawn.
      Soothing—the mourning doves.
During this half of the year, May through October, we live in a green
      bower.
We turn the house inside out, move into the mountains.

In their annual order, flowers appear in the understory: coltsfoot, hepatica
      and trillium through to the end, late purple aster, spotted joe pye and
      pearly everlasting.
We let Nicky nurse her road ****, watch over it, roll around on it.
Don’t let go of the steering wheel while driving fast in the passing lane.

Brown oak leaves underfoot, last year's sodden
reminders that newness always ends. But
not today

while the creek, silent in summer, chortles
about last night's rain, full of spring vigor
far below

the limestone bluff edge where
I stand, chert nodules and fractals
peeking through

springy new undergrowth, broke down
limbs, leaf litter and dark soil.  I came
for morels


but it's too early, too chill yet. Tomorrow's
predicted sun may bring them out. Early
mayapple

sprouts fool me, draw me to admire other
understory plants: trillium, maidenhair fern,
spring beauty,

johnny jump-up and more whose names
I knew once but forgot. I came alone and
I don't need

names. Names mean nothing without
voices and other ears. I love the silence
I bring here.

You may feel about the planet what
you feel about a great baseball team or band:
that once there was a moment when, unknown
to us at the time, we convened
and lost and found ourselves in what we created.

Who should I thank for this day?
A fresh-mown lawn is a robin's repast.
A bear a black bear a rolling delicately dancing
graceful as silence sailing through the ferns and understory
unafraid and in no hurry.

My musician referral service, vacation rental business,
nonprofit management system, plant identification database,
great American songbook and anthology of poems. Coach says
in a thousand years back and forth games like lacrosse and soccer
will be played against genetically engineered primates

but baseball will be played solely by humans.
In a thousand years, amen.

Peering beyond the understory:
a Victorian *******
of square topiaries
white pavement
marbled fringe,
the visionary leaps
into the crisp chlorine
freezing in an iceblock
if she remains til she is grey.

But she crawls out
of this boxed madness,
emotional baggage
forcefully drilled into Her womb.
She emerges from a pond
in a wooded world remote
yet available to all who seek it.
An unsure path
to the cottage
where the witch works her wondrous magic
bringing birds and butterflies
to aid in potion incantations
She mows no lawns.
She knows the name of every leaf and berry.
She sows them in her sleep

Spring is sprung.
Clouds of maple.
Skies of pine.

Red in green.
Serviceberry understory.
Spring is sprung.

Skunk cabbage spathe.
Black birch sap.
Poplar flowers.

Opossum tires.
Spring is sprung.
Blackbird wing.

Wasps won't sting.
My father died.
Town meeting Monday.

Spring is sprung.
Sing cuccu!
There's no down side.

Infinite willow.
Leaning oak.
Spring and sprung.

Budding flame.
Budding thumb.
Cat claw.

Bird yolk.
Spring is sprung.
Dandelion

Shoots. Arrowhead
Roots. Waterproof
Boots. Old bed young.

Spring is sprung.
Ring and wrong.
Thank and thought.

Seed and sawn.
Wait and walk.
Spring is sprung.

Deep into the rainforest, a struggle to survive

From insects to leaved trees, wanting all to thrive

The habitat of animals, species all around

Living things a-plenty, crawling on the ground



The four main layers play a different role

The bio-diversity forms part of the whole

The dark forest floor and the understory

Shorter plants existing, many bugs to see



The vibrant middle layer, yet forms the canopy

Climbing the emergent, just like a monkey

The strong plant materials, helps to build a home

For people of the Amazon, food that has been grown



Tropical regions, Equator ever near

A moderate climate, giant trees are here

Forests on a mountain, misty all around

Coated in a moss, such an eerie surround



North and South America and Oceania

Asia and Europe, as well as Africa

There’s a cycle of life, yet deforestation

Affects the homes of animals for plantation



Removing ecosystems, can cause erosion

Droughts as well as flooding, less cohesion

The modern ways of man affects vegetation

Contributing to a silent devastation



Replanting, recycling, assisting with crops

Steps of preservation quench like raindrops

The precious seeds and life, of which can be found

Yet, it’s not too late to turn this world around



Written by Geraldine Taylor ©

We like trees.
Rocks. Crows.

Trees are good.
Shade. Food. Wood.

If they leave,
we'll leave, too.

Snow. How come
some there, none here.

Sun can ****
or be fun.

God can't care
about you, one.

Jacket caught
in thought thicket.

Barberry, rose
thorn in nose.

Elect a nobel laureate
not a noble idiot.

Eat. Eat so much
your bones grow.

Kinnakinnik. Chinquapin.
Almost edible words.

Naked buds, bears,
understory shrubs.

i.
i drag the canoes over the granite shingle
of our island's beach the battered Aluma-Crafts
leave my hand a dark metallic looking gray, which
even smelled of metal we walk up to the
campsite, a ridge, overlooking the lake,
spread out around a fire ring set beneath
pine trees so thick that no understory grows

ii.
as the long summer day cools we decide after dinner
to explore choosing one of the island's many
game trails, leading from the water back up into
the woods beyond the campsite, we pack the
food back into the bear proof barrel, grab our
boots and set off down  the trail

iii.
the pine give way to a grove of aspen, the
leaves fluttering as if by some wondrous
enchantment, as the shrubs started to grow
thickly on the ground channeling us into a
narrower game trail with the large, misshapen
granite boulders like a maze stretched out before us

iv.
suddenly we stood face to face with a giant
bull moose with velvet covered antlers that seemed
to be at least four feet across, he shook his head up,
like a horse shying, so i slowly moved us behind a tree
     to give him the trail

v.
around the fire wrapped each in our
own paddle-worn thoughts
we could hear wolves, calling
across the island in mournful howls
such a delicate balance of nature at work,
my moose so full of life and spirit would be
     safe yet from the
wolves

In the halls of nature the leaves rain down to meet me
Shy flowers open to bathe amongst the eager dapples of light
Earthy archetypal fragrances manifest as home

And I, moist like  the damp soil of the Understory
cater to notions of running my gnarly roots into the ground
to penetrate

I give into the lust of sticky stigma
inhaling explosions of pollen
initiating my fertilization

The magic of the forest
requires that you enter it
get lost in it

Get lost
to get found

Blackbrush -- Coleogyne ramosissima
the dominant understory shrub
in the pinyon-juniper canyons.

Mountain-mahogany -- Cercocarpus montanus and ledifolia.
Single-leaf ash -- Fraxinus anomalus
and possibly a western hophornbeam

by the small birch-like leaves
and the shredding bark
in a moist stretch of joint trail.

The joint-fir, green ephedra
looks like an ocean plant.
Could the wind or white water rivers alone

have shaped these sandstone, red rock forms?
Network of canyons, inverse of mountains.
It had to be ocean

ebbing and flowing, emotionally, like wind,
moving atmosphere, thicker
shaving, scraping, polishing, gouging, digging

fish canyons
then, shallower, dinosaur swamps
now, dry, rock gardens.

Explain the human history with water:
did the Anasazi visit neighbors
along the canyon rims and deep within,

combination caves and red-rock houses
small windows, doorways, just crawlways,
with corn gifts on summer evenings

when the canyon bottoms held permanent, not intermittent,
streams? After them
came the Ute and Navajo, Spanish and English.

Ravens dine on road ****.
A few long red roads connect some canyons.
The unprotected flats are overgrazed, rabbitbrush.

It is interesting
that as I learn the woody and herbaceous plants,
walk the desert foothills, I too could stay.

Rhodora in winter, capsule like a claw,
remains of the 5-part flower Emerson saw,
gone to seed. Deciduous trees and shrubs
have their own winter beauty and a power
akin to the fittest's survival, self-same
that brought me, musing, here. Large globose buds!
(that dwarf the rose's but not the butternut's)  
distinguish it from other Ericaceae that
surround this inland wetland. The Lord
all claim to worship is not better
than thou. I'm passing through naming you,
your parts, and the autumn elaeagnus who
is your neighbor. Good a walk as it gets
before edible understory herbs sprout.

We counted seventeen that morning,
driving in circles around Greenbelt Park.
Biding time before preschool drop-off,
we moved in measured paces beneath
a verdant canopy of oak and Virginia pine,
crossing diminutive rivulets repeatedly,
revisiting the same downed tree limbs
and tired park signs, disappearing and
reappearing in mist, our languorous
revolutions seemingly interminable,
each lap lost behind our slipstream.

It was a game we played together,
my daughter and I, circumnavigating
that slight road and counting the deer.
We tallied the bucks, does, and fawns
in plain sight, either ignorant or bold.
Vigilant, we watched for minuscule
movements beyond the windshield,
subtle stirrings in the understory:
a foreleg caught in a confusion of ferns;
a white tail, brazen, above the blueberries
or hovering, a clump of cotton atop holly;
caramel eyes cupped in mountain laurel—
ephemeral proof, woodland intimations.

Most days, we saw nothing
but familiar creatures as we
circled, spinning our wheels.
If we parked on the shoulder,
the black ribbon of bitumen
seemed to move beneath us still,
a vinyl track playing under tires,
daughter and I locked in place—
two diamonds at the tip of a needle,
skipping across prosaic grooves.

But the morning of the seventeen!
The moon hung dilatory in the sky,
a winking crescent eye, opaline.
And with each loop, the number grew.

-------------------------------------

Two years later, I circle back,
my daughter and I walking
toward a black fishing pier,
gulls etching invisible lines
into an aquamarine sky.

I ask her if she remembers
those rides before preschool,
if she remembers the morning
we saw those seventeen deer.
We pause, waves washing
white sea foam over our feet.  
She looks beyond the breakers,
taking in the horizon’s hard line,
a crisp indigo seam that appears
to stitch the round world straight.
One hand rests on her bony hip;
the other grips a shell-filled pail.
She turns, sizing me up with the
cold skepticism of a six year old,
and shakes her head in disbelief.
She tells me I’ve got it all wrong:
It couldn’t have been that many.

I’m tempted to argue. Instead,
I ask her, why does that number
(seventeen!) seem too high.

She looks at me, incredulous.
What am I trying to prove?
She speaks in small measures,
makes herself perfectly clear:

We were driving
in circles, Daddy,
and the deer,
the deer,
they move.

At once the horizon bends,
azure arc in space and time;
gulls stall in midair, snapshots
above suspended breakers. Silence.
Suddenly I’m back in Greenbelt Park,
treading nimbly, veiled by ivy screens,
leaping broken dogwoods cantilevered
over precious shallow streams,
muscles, ears, and eyes electrified.
I see as the unseen eighteenth deer
would have seen us—two creatures
harnessed in a restless death machine,
recumbent gods marking territory.

Around again. Wait.
Another close orbit.
Scrutinize red taillights
fading to distance and
then explode, vaulting
across alien asphalt,
hard halo of misery:
unnumbered,
exalted,
infinite.

tiniest blossoms of red-bud understory woven through bare trees

Peter (my bf) and I are at Heraclee beach for the weekend.
It’s a little sliver of heaven, about 11 miles south of Saint Tropez.
It’s too early in the season to swim - being breezy and 72°f -
but it’s still the beach. I’m a neophyte beach ***,
but I’m willing and eager to learn.

I’m valuable even if I’m not being productive [I self-affirm].

something poetic-ish..

The sun’s a drowsy tyrant, not yet willing to unforgivingly scorch.
The beach is like glistening sugar, the sand still cool enough to walk, rogue west winds occasionally whip it to an ankle stinging sandpaper.

Majestic umbrella pines are dancing the hula. The shrub-like understory is dominated by drought-tolerant lavenders and rosemary that dense the air with perfume which complements the mediterranean brine.

There’s laughter, off somewhere, like wind-chimes playing clear, just above the ever-roiling sound of the surf. Birds are everywhere, gulls walk around like they’re bored, cory float on air, like kites and petrels skim against the wind, centimeters above choppy waves.

The beach isn’t crowded - French kids are still in school - but a few hardy, oiled, bronzed and sculpted bodies are sprawled on the pristine sand, like offerings to the god of leisure.

Our hotel has its own private cove, with adirondack wooden lounges under yellow parasols. Pastel blue-vested wait-staffers circle, on the quarter-hour, eager to please.
“Deux (two) American Martinis, S'il te plaît! (please),” I ask, expectantly.

It’s a **** beach, but Peter got an alarmed look when I joked I might go *******. “Annick (my older sister) always goes *******,” I informed him.
“I’d like to see that,” he’d chuckled, and when I gave him a raised eyebrow, he amended, “That came out wrong.”
.
.
songs for this..
Summer of Our Love by Triangle Sun
That life by Unknown Mortal Orchestra
The kiss of Venus by Dominic Fike, Paul McCartney

i.
one dark night as
i left my silent house
the long driveway
lay itself before me
i looked back, down
from the driveway's
apron at the street
the house unlit
seemed almost
brooding back in
it's dark wood

ii.
the half turn at the
ancient oak, which leans
out over the driveway,
aching for light, and then
the gentle sweep of curve,
along the line of
stately maples, which
turn such a lovely
golden red in autumn

iii.
i could just make
out the main
entrance and chimney
side, the bedroom wing
hidden behind the
dense understory
of viburnum
it seemed to me
that Maple Ridge,
secreted as it was
back in Darkwood,
was much like the
life of the people
dwelt within

iv.
the dark and the brooding
had touched those lives,
like mourners on the edge
of some young lover's grave,
there in that dark wood,
the woman had believed
the man who dared
that love might conquer all,
and that being subdued,
had seemed better than
mere surrender

v.
but now, that bitterness
had leeched into
these very walls,
i had paused, in this
heart-stopping notion,
to ask myself what if
these mourners dwelt
there in this dark wood,
unobserved and naked,
now buried, in this silent
wood

Full of doubt. About survival of the species and my own.
A plague of tent caterpillars, worse than an infestation,
an insurgency that has left the sky naked, bones revealed,
trees knee deep in webbing.

Another way to look at it: The caterpillars have opened up
the understory. It's not a form of terrorism,
it's an opportunity for otherwise repressed species
to assert genetic relevance.

A scientist gets out among the ticks and webs, observes
the march of barberries up the watershed, mustards spread
in tire treads, and hidden among this mess of invasives,
a jalopy of a hunter's roost.

Beer cans are also diagnostic. Inwood Park,
dog **** and abandoned cars, yet a copper beech around
      which
Indians camped. The broken asphalt and Spanish language.
Humanity followed time there.

When I see a fox, a coyote or a bear, I think What Good
      Luck
to be made of clay and alive this year. If I saw a cougar
I would not know what to do. It would change my life,
like an archaic torso of Apollo.

Look for the silver lining. Walk on the sunny side of the street.
Count your blessings. Life goes on. A little better every day in
      every way.
You can't take it with you. It's only money. People who need
      people are
the luckiest beetles in the world.

Zefian; Butler of the greater demon, he would be forced to make the main stained glass window of the Castello del Horcondising, he will continue to put himself on the posts in each hermit tree to recruit from the horsemen lordships of the autumnal massif, towards an eternal wailing of birches in harmony. Pay attention to the words and challenges of presence in the Vernarthian Sub Mythology in Horcondising. Everything will be for the creative principle of a new world, where the materiality that will be useless on the surface, is of value and prosperity ubiquitously in any space where the human race degrades to eternity levels of consciousness.

Biological goal, codes of life, material works beyond a life that reconciles organic life and ethereal life. The evolutionary codes of life go further from the super existence, creating transformations that alternate life in spiritual memory, based on multidimensional spiritual intelligence. The consequence and serial of future ideas or captures of fruitive life,  which will be continued in storage links of gospels of remembrance, to preserve our bio-evolutionary trajectory codes. Super microscopic particles will be decomplexed by Zefián, more withdrawn from the demonicity that is rooted in our faith codes, procreating from there to our filtering mechanics of the dogma of existence, to be applied as perfectible memorization tools, allelomorphic from Tsambika to Horcondising. Creating codes of life and experiences between the creation of God and the creation of the superficial world, in such a way that between both canons, the emergent and fleeting guideline of experience contained in the threshold of death is issued. To go further away from the light itself that does not invade us with diseases correlative to the decomposition and corruptibility of the human born and steely spirit, heading towards an ethereal biological goal. .

Says Leiak: “As the spirit of the Vernarth forest in Horcondising, I have been a multi-parasitic organism in the barks of hyper-spaced oaks, beyond all vanity of large volumes of knowledge and extensions of knowledge. My possible genomes change, each time I blink for a longer time, than the short time I have when resources mutate in such a silent time, which I have been able to measure mathematically. The adaptations of nature to threatening changes also endorse the soul of plants, endowing them with the property of resurrection. The comparative sequences make the evolution of the divine being go beyond the biodegradable sequence, to the point of biological balance of constituting a new life, in the plane of selectivity proper to the particles that carry and attract towards the receptacle of a new life, under the code of a transition from one to one that is reborn in another. Each microscopic element functions as a totalitarian entity in Vernarth submythology, harmoniously linking the chaos and concretion of the world of Genesis with the world of the polytheistic worldview.

Says Borker: “My vaporous voice of the curse, guide that heralds a new one that is leading in Tsambika. Everything bad tends to resurrect in the arms of goodness, where it provides nourishment for those who need to incubate new chains of organic and inorganic adaptability, evangelized and not evangelized, because the light that carries them from the top of the oaks that I pass through the mornings, they always greet me, to proceed like Borker, son of nothing and father of nobody. Here I will be to lead together with Vernarth, the emancipation of the stagnant eco-systemic chains that are stranded in the mud of the administrative power of the supposed super intelligence, which relativizes everything and intervenes. Not knowing that the great super reason by itself recreates itself, making new chaos or riddles, overcome by itself”
Zefián says: “Originally, thousands of cells have been condemned to encompass the density of matter and life on the planet of the experiments called Earth. What is between heaven and earth is in the sub mythology of both poles. Eurydice was in the Orphic world given her romanticism with Orpheus Himself, now she is in our tracóntero, in the mask where she leads the forces between heaven and earth. Right here the Horcondising, which fills us with high associative density. Our populations have to live in the temples of evolutionary austerity and meekness, after events of three-dimensional changes, ours here in Horcondiing has already been mentioned, which is the same as now in Tsambika, for all the parishioners decomposing, but biologically mutating to reborn in a useful life reborn from the seed of sweet death "
  
The Vernarthian sub mythology is the one that perfectly communes with the genesis of the first light and sound, amplifying each other, adapting nobly with the amplitude of momentum exerted, to settle in plans of management of history in thick episodes that have not written by mortal hands in real or fictitious transition which we also conform. Each character that intervenes in the Verthian world ..., here something or someone has complementarity with all the heroes and titans that have existed in our collective memories, making them the anti-heroes or titans that still do not know each other.

Ingratia mol de petal says: “even after being purified, everything must be re-purified; we all owe it to thanks to the constant variability of the notes of the cosmos and its generation. The auras of action surpassed those that add up by thousands of years. I am a liquidator of cancer circles of carcinoma and sainete nodules”

Spermazoid fable is presented to everyone: “Serous plasma runs through the grasslands, before the supra-human count in Horcondising. We are all invisible liquid, that speaks crawling and feeding back its wounds, that do not fit with words that speak further of the rigor of well-being. As a heretical pro, he advanced in the roughness of all the ravines and abandoned reliefs, but when he advanced I do not retreat! I am more vile than time, because time passes and retraces the protozoan memory, moving me away to memories that live and are avant-garde of a mortal, but I have nothing everything. When I have these roughness, I am time and its atomic mass dimension stops time, and attached me to its extermination and nihilistic empty concavity”

Orfilia and Aranhis say while dancing: “a sylph and a naiad appear dressed in white, auguring the feminine aspect of the majesty of the elements. They dance through all the co-rugosities of Verthian sub-mythology, with the support of annulling the hieratic intervention of the spermatozoid fable, for this purpose of relativizing the chromatics of the mythological beings that made a dialogue wheel, peripatetic, even being actors having only audience of those who do not know each other. They dance and dance through all the estuaries and stands of the aristocratic families, who went more than three thousand meters to be judged by themselves, to be redistributed to the chilling of the simile *** bei Hinnom, which is at the top of Horcondising, where all the hallucinating timid flashes of all the re-born flowers of the spring of love whistle fiercely contained in the rosy tones of the Trisolate "

Trisolate: “I am and will be the great conductivity of great energy. Symbolism with a premise today to not think and know words with symbolism of speaking oak barks, where this oak says in itself (I say, later you say), the pronoun must be mutated to the sixth plane, where now we will say or that has never been heard. Only by naming the one that is no longer in the associative language of linguistic clans subject to the sixth pronoun of oaks that live and will live with the code of the language that we have never heard, but starting today if, as a point of reference already bet in the ears of the tree and not the deixis protozoan man! "
  
Vernarth says: “When I try to sleep at night resting my head on the understory of oaks, I sleep painlessly because of the vertebrae that urge to rearrange me, because the roots of his ego on the sixth plane make me consciously independent of the references of my fantasies, It will not be long before my wing comes around the metaphysical corner. Here at the Castello del Horcondising the blocks are not square, they are baldons of the memory of the natural ego, which takes the tram through which my shoes came without clothes that condition it or allow it to express itself tetraplegically handicapped, rather more validated by being trapped by the ghostly essence of oak that is never born or dies, but knowing that it has no Ego”

My forest
written December 28th, 2020

My forest is the 2 trees
outside my front window

the overstory of my forest
is a prickly ball tree
research says
it is a chestnut or sweetgum tree

the overstory is tall and hearty
giving generous shade in the summer
and raining prickly *****
on the yard in the fall

the understory of my forest
is a dogwood
that blooms gloriously each spring
as it reaches from under the prickly ball tree
for the sun it's greedy sibling hogs

there are forests (and poems)
much more expansive than mine
built more complexly
more often talked about
photographed, written about

but this little 2 tree forest
has been my company
for 20 years now

they are my trees (and my words)
and they are precious to me.

You were you.
a man with shades of darkness that consumed.
A man with hands that loved
but fingers that dealt
instead of feelings that felt.

I was me,
a boy with eager optimism.
A boy with firecracker emotions,
and all you ever did was set me on fire,
but how could I ever mind with those loving hands.

You were a man with a distant sweetness,
reminiscent of honeysuckle,
of the pine needles strewn upon the ground
upon which I now stand.
Perhaps more tasted in the air than smelled,I inhale deeply
with the vapor wafting unseen on the breeze.

Trees stand lifeless,
their wood dry and white
the bark once clung desperately to the wooden knots of the timber
just as we had once clung to one another.

The sun of the new morning streaks in slim rays
between inhabitants of the dense woodland.
The aftermath defined beauty.

No animals hunt,
no birds call.
Instead the crunch of our feet
upon the twigs and leaves
that litter the understory
echo across the vast forest.

Mosquitoes do not even fly
through the breeze
which you once made sweet for me.

It has happened again
While I'm not looking...
Snow drops and crocuses
tumbling into tulips and azaleas
The slow muted understory of color on the snow
Traipsing toward the waking sun
that herald robin
V of the geese
ever-pointing the direction
out of darkness
into life

...to reach the crescendo, yet again
Leave behind the bud ~
exquisite ~ Hope
of mere possibility
of dew jewels scattered in the green

And never grow tired of this procession

to love life
to love life

Love ~
Inexpressible

Love inaccessibly fragile
fool of a child
we always long to be
Love ripped apart at the V

The bold and delicate trees bow down beckoning me.
We are all in one bundled in a grand emporium prolific cornucopia.
My pudgy feet make acquaintance with your smooth clay ground.
The understory of shrubbery demure and quaint basking in the sun.
We are all in one.
The inhabitants below the ground tunneling and supplementing your crust with nutrients whilst my furled brows arch up towards the halcyon sky.
I can't pin a denotation of what life is, but I can utter a word that resonates in my purest of minds.
Connect.
Only connect, and all will be fine.

Under a temple of sequoia,
I do not fear your ravenous wild
which lives in everything—
flowering desire.

What drives my folly
drips longingly with mad nectar,
finds your mystery alive in my eyes,
mystery coloured in vibrant azalea.

There is no forest, just
deciduous portals to other worlds.

Beneath an outgrowing meadow
of detritus, decay has a lurid scent
of pine that lingers; And your roots

guide my descent into the darkest deep,
a thousand years into the Holocene.

Show me
how to carry this endless dream.
Make me remember where
I am and will always be:

in raindrops streaming
to the understory,

in hollowed trees pulsing rivers
of sun in between,

in conifer transpiring seeds
from branch to leaf,

in earthworms relishing
the sweetness of skin,

in the enduring vision of you
that exists in the marrows
of me.

Maybe in time
touched by waterfalls of memory,
I will return to your world again—
cloaked in dirt and evergreen.

~~~
Sunlight sweeps above the dale
while shades of heather
lift their veil
Then gentle mist of morning
swirls
enhancing dawn
with nature's pearls
~
Songbird's flight encircles glen
to spot late crawler's
search for den
Yet...
not all that dwells in understory
hides this day...
this day's their glory
~
The songbirds flee... the piper grins
"Far Darrig O'Malice
yer at it again"
The silence broke
the wildwoods rustle
From near and far
the wee ones
hustle
~
The songs roll out
the barrels too
the leprechauns abandon shoe
They all break out one piece of gold
To waste
before their play grows cold
~
They barter sheep
while lifting hogs
They saddle...
ride
the farmer's dogs
And all the while they laugh and shout
they never spill their mugs of stout
~
The Cluricauns with stouter trumpet
descend the town
subdue the strumpet
Spend their purse to chase romance
The quean much slicker
steals their pants
~
Within the glen
with dusk's approach
the smoke gets thick as suppers roast
The music swirls
the echoes sail
The dancers chant an Irish tale
~
And those with naked butts
are taught
They stop
it gives the bugs a shot

Far Darrigs crawl beneath the kegs
they pop the corks and fill their legs
~
St. Patrick's blessed another year
The sound of snoring
now all you hear
~~~

Small thrush in the understory,
Speckled neck resembling the spray of notes,
Of your calliope song in all its glory,
Resplendent music, the art of throats

Oh , love of mine
My eternal flame
You took my soul
And my war game

Do songs of wonder bring you near?
Do the broken smile tell you tales?
If you saw my heart beat and my love
You know by now what prevails

Rainbows and cherries wrapped in a bow
Soft hands and berries all in a flow
You made me feel, and you made me kneel
And, now you have become my Achilles' heel

If you ever look back and see me there
Know I breathed and counted fair
My vices are my friends of care
If you only you knew how to be there

Love of mine, you took me places
But, left my hand and made me trace less
Love of mine, if you ever hear me
Listen closely, and feel my plea

You were my King of gold and silver
You burnt me down and made me shiver
My King has lost all his glory
Taking me to the path of an understory

I feel trees come out of the base of each spinal column,
When I creek in the morning a thousand nesting birds sing for my arrival,
my vascular cambium fillls its lungs with life and breathes it out too,
my only hope is that fire comes and clears the understory for my seeds.

Do we feel it when it all falls unconscious
What if all the mothers on the planet
Were ensconced into their hearts simultaneously
And if for a single moment
There was freedom from the tyranny
Of endless duties and responsibilities
Would it all fall apart at once

I beg your pardon
But tonight's sunset was one of the Sun's most fertile deposits
So what if we were to shun the day
And instead make love to the darkness of the desert
For the pheasant is my ancestral totem
And it is obvious in the moonlight
That you motion to me like a novice
For after you and I are seduced by the harvest
We can choose first among the stardust
Its true that all this was once our own garden
From a time when we first learned to become human
Until we eventually return to the understory
Of our aboriginal commonality

We are still happening
We are learning to shun acceptance
And make due with unexpected lessons
We are undifferentiated fantasy
In lands of cholera and chronic romances
We are far from perfect
But we still always try to do our best
And i don't expect you to protest anything

And if we dance for days against the apathy we make
And spray gradients of sound from our awakening
Into the pleroma’s defiance
We can try out our mouthpieces
And seek fingers of lightning
At a height quite defiant
Whenever we get uptight like a runway
Sundays are always smiling
And whenever we make love
We break records with our bodies
Against the conundrums
Of being polished too roughly
We funnel living diamonds
Into pipelines of supply and demand
Like cats and mice we chase trends around bends
Of commerce and economic insurgency

At the beach or the park it is appropriate to lie on the ground.
To sit still and do nothing but absorb the cries of gulls or the hum of an airplane or other distant sounds and smells and sensations.
But you can absorb those things standing up, and here on the ground
there is a world you can only explore if you put your eye up next to it.
At the beach it is not uncommon, when aimlessly watching people, to espy someone
(a child more often than not)
running their fingers through the sand,
transfixed in the singular feel of it and-if they are looking-
its infinite aesthetic.
Each grain is a world anew and you would not know it unless you
put your face right up to the ground and looked.
At the park it's much the same.
Two-inch fields of grass give away to dirt plateaus,
and it turns out there are a thousand little scarabs-
black & green & red jewels scurrying in the understory.
Twigs as big as logs lie haphazardly, and there a leaf is
wilting, wilting, wilting
for weeks or forever.
I knew a woman once who did not wait for the beach or the park.
In her observation of the ground she was infinitely delighted.
There was always something new or unexpected just waiting to be found if only the
right mind was there to appreciate it.
Tesoras she called them.
She would hold up a piece of dead grass as if it were a seashell pointing out a fold or dip that created a shadow just… so.
“Tesora”.
Now sometimes when the viscera of my mind have trouble digesting a certain memory
I lie on the floor and stare at the veneer of dust,
a tangle of hair,
or the husk of a stink bug and in my mind I see a leaf
wilting, wilting, wilting.

Not exhausted
myself pursuing, your
thoughtless fervor of understory
without retrieving my name.

Do you still remember
the grace of unspoken thoughts?
Once the cobra night, raises
its hood, nobody can stop the strike.

Syntax was
beautiful, not the abstract
of the hidden truth. You
resign to become a unique!

Helpless in my integrity
I don't forgive me, when
I forget my enemy.
And start thievery.

Untamed, by a large, rod
vase of moon, ready to
leap at a shooting star.

This community
Of color
Is a dark distorted lover
Off the lot
Missed her a lot
When you’re the arid swamp
Despot
And misbegotten
Bird of mocking
Make the penman
Fill the plot
And not a thought is lost
On motions passed
In petty Freddy Gray
In petty cash,
In gaseous masks
In play bills on parade
Just herbal verbal
supplementals
Twigs and cap and spores
And scores of elemental
Muses
Understory roars
When force alone
Can often turn
The people on the camera
And suddenly it’s like
Entire worlds
Are out to scam ‘ya
It’s a capital imperial
Dominion
Taking hold
And Capitol-attacking
Masses
Who still want it for
The gold

At the beach or the park it is appropriate to lie on the ground.
To sit still and do nothing but absorb the cries of gulls or the hum of an airplane or other distant sounds and smells and sensations.
But you can absorb those things standing up, and here on the ground
there is a world you can only explore if you put your eye up next to it.
At the beach it is not uncommon, when aimlessly watching people, to espy someone
(a child more often than not)
running their fingers through the sand,
transfixed in the singular feel of it and- if they are looking-
its infinite aesthetic.
Each grain is a world anew and you would not know it unless you
put your face right up to the ground and looked.
At the park it's much the same.
Two-inch fields of grass give away to dirt plateaus,
and it turns out there are a thousand little scarabs-
black & green & red jewels scurrying in the understory.
Twigs as big as logs lie haphazardly, and there a leaf is
wilting, wilting, wilting
for weeks or forever.
I knew a woman once who did not wait for the beach or the park.
In her observation of the ground she was infinitely delighted.
There was always something new or unexpected just waiting to be found if only the
right mind was there to appreciate it.
Tesoras she called them.
She would hold up a piece of dead grass as if it were a seashell pointing out a fold or dip that created a shadow just… so.
“Tesora”.
Now sometimes when the viscera of my mind have trouble digesting a certain memory
I lie on the floor and stare at the veneer of dust,
a tangle of hair,
or the husk of a dead stink bug and in my mind I see a leaf
wilting, wilting, wilting.