The Poetry Marathon

It must have happened long ago
when the wooden desk and wooden chair
were taken outside
Perhaps it was an eviction and
after all of the people had left and
the house was no more and
the land and the made things in the land
were forgotten
a sanctuary of memory
grew and grew and grew
and the atoms began to link up
in familiar ways
untroubled by the interlude
known as the age of
the anthropocene and
the world was on its
way to a new balance and
a new phase

Plague
War
Death
Famine

Apocalypse

Revolts
Suppressions
Coups
Empires

Guns

Fires
Extinctions
Gluttonies
Poisons

Greed

Zombies
Werewolves
Vampires
Ghosts

Nightmares

Slavery
Colonialism
racism
sexism

History

Lies
Lies
Lies
Lies

Truth-teller

Plague
War
Death
Famine

Apocalypse

Of late I am drawn to
the color orange
It was not always so
but now I seek out orange that
word that rhymes with almost no words
in shirts pants food art
It is quite curious this
love affair
Nearby a very slow moving
stream fills a shallow pond
with an iron rich orange
mixed slush
that don’t tell anyone
I give more than
a passing thought
to stripping and
smearing it all
over my body

As the world continues to burn
our rain has been more
than abundant
The run-off ditches on
my woodsy, walking route
have been full
and once altered the foot path
as a reminder of water’s
resistance to human design
The troughs filled with swaying
bright green grasses
triggered memories when
I used to backpack and
hike a trail
that would often parallel
a free flowing
stream and I felt
at least for a short time
I belonged to that
moment

Nature is calling us to act now
The earth will go on without us
It has many paths to evolve
We have very few options
Do we have the will
To change our ways
renewal
or face
Death

We gathered our backpack filled with
hand lenses, plant ID books, water and our favorite
sourdough, peanut butter, banana, and fruit spread sandwiches.
Changing into gumshoes for the expected wetlands trails
we meet at a storefront near the trailhead before leaving
together for this early morning forest ranger guided tour of the flora.
We encounter the common periwinkle, a lovely purplish ground cover flower,
considered an invasive, problematic species brought over from Europe during the 1700s.
White people who control the skyscrapers of power don’t write in bios
their role as an invasive species in this land.

After Shuntaro Tanikawa

Nothing new to report that I
haven’t read about before except for the intentionally lost
opportunities to act in good faith and in a
manner that grapples with the pandemic, the very
essence of an universal concern, which they made worthless
by a determination to be the 21st century version of the do nothing
party of the 19th century. It is all done in full view by detouring us down rabbit holes that
send us hither and yonder so they will not be held
culpable for their genius for the grift which they are so fond
of as it reminds us again of the 19 th century and the memories
of the Gilded Age where greed knew no boundaries and caused so much suffering for
so many people in the world. “Nothing new under sun” seems apt to me.

There is no place like home
People in glass houses should not throw stones
Fortune favors the bold
Action speaks louder than words
There’s no time like the present
Strike while the iron is hot
All is fair in love and war
You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs
Better safe than sorry
You can’t have your cake and eat it too
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
You reap what you sow
All good things must come to an end
Easy come easy go

Is the mental health exam over?

The earth-toned land at the edge
of my known world
has been prepared for planting
as two large gas balloons, rainbow colored,
hover, one above the other,
as border markers near the narrow basin
that leads to the unknown.
Squinting my eyes and looking very closely
I try to see beyond, but the beyond
merges with low horizon and is an enigma.
I pack my knapsack with food, bedding,
water, a travel diary book, and search for a way
into the photo to cross the prepped soil
so I can enter the basin and find my path
through it to that somewhere
just outside the limits
of my imagination.

We and the world are changing daily
so that the notion of stability or the usual
seems an absurd construct of a needy, anxious species.
Our cells are constantly coming and going
at different rates, and at different ages
defying a simple equation to describe in total
the normal human being in the world at a point in time,
let alone several points.
The variables can be infinite and
like the Big Bang returning home
will not be the same.