your wakefulness
(your headache)
exists in the concrete forest
this asphalt desert
stretches toward a dumpster called
Forever
christ had 40 days in his fated desert:
how would he have done
with tar & roiling interstates?
christianity might have died
on the vine
isolation without solitude,
rat stuck in noises,
the kinetics of buses
& aeroplanes merging toward
continuous blur
vertiginous blur
there are no jobs in
traditional deserts,
in traditional forests,
there: life exists without humankind
trees are falling, making
noises, but we
cant hear them, because of sirens
because of
ringtones & accelerations
my senses are utter urbanity -
thus, i am (myself) urbanity
this is my destiny
i'll try to make do
ii.
i am not a martyr
(far from it!), rather
i'm a heavy human
in bus smog, listening
to a thousand channels
of chatter,
aeroplanes disturb my
reading, i pay bills, cough,
& carry on
i park where im told,
i stand in grocery lines,
i race up the stairs
(heart overcaffeinated)
i attend to newspapers, & TV,
i attend to rapid
electronic communications
i stare at the refrigerator
light but never really "see" it,
i yearn to write
and in my writing
the noise
diminishes (somewhat)
i use words as rotors to
bore through ennui,
i use words to transcend
beyond cable television's dramatic
portrayals of good-looking men &
good-looking women desiring to
get it on
i use words to diagram
my layers of psychological dross
so that, with enough writing,
i begin to see kernels of my unique,
personal being
i develop that being, there
into a pastoral being,
here:
of thoreau's walden
& twain's mississippi,
of cather's antonia
& whitman's brooklyn, of
wilder's little house
& wyeth's chadds ford
im just a country poet,
really,
a bare footed
grass-eatin' poet
scanning the dictionary
for precise nature words like
moraine & crag and
canopy & foliage
just looking at insect wings
& marveling at the design
just walking under billions of stars
breathing, going nowhere
&, in my dream
my language journey begins to mirror
my physical journey
& i become a real nature poet
once and for all
& years later
after many rotations in nature
i just "become".