Dying Breath

The wind respires life
Through the lungs of the forest
Coughing up man’s smoke

Reclamation

I once loved the city and its gleaming promise
Of slicked back, urbane haute cultured praxis
Circus sideshows, embonpoint and spectacle
Where cinereous clad clouds hover like buzzards

Circling in place over the dying with talons drawn
A comedy of gnarring error & industrial pageantry
Starbucks, museums, statues of dead presidents
Inexorable pomp de rigeur and saccharine elegance

I once feared the forest
The howls and yowls
Snarls and growls
Footsteps, hisses

Roars, booms, thuds
Shrieks,moans, buzzes
Snaps, crackles, pops
In the blackstill night

Not to mention poison oak
And thirsty wheedling ticks
The shake rattle and roll
Of uliginous snakes

Widow making spiders
Killer bees, dust devils
Packs of wolves, giardia
Raging rivers, wildfires

Exposure, frostbite
Precipitous declines
From dizzying heights
And getting totally lost

But like my abandoned chrysalis
My love for the city left behind
I scratched away my wormed past
My new wings emerge unscathed
To behold the mirabilia of Her bloom,

Serpentine flight paths of dragonflies
And the symmetry of their catstitch eyes
Sewn by the fosterage of drunk artists
Crystallized matrices of etched peaks
Chiseled and embossed by aeons past

Even rainy weeks of ghostly mist
Socked in and grey eventually crack
Aglow at dusk like a pagan fire ritual
My only prayers to ever come true
Or uttered were to the bashful sun

Armageddon doesn’t mean shit
My hope is in the reclamation
Snatched from clumsy apes’ thumbs
Longing for the rightful heiress
And her fawn-eyed return

Home

First Light

Pure beauty stripped down
To naked primal wonder
In a baby’s eyes