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Greatest sharks dripping in and out of eye sockets
Thrashing against rusted panels of brutes
Unequivocally intimidating in my self-made habitat
Hunters marked me by my callousness–I’m it for the season
Charlatans parade on their boats for just my apparition
Breaching to show you my undisputed domination
Beware the Deadliest catch! She bites!
You sought and saw my imbedded scales
Snatch me from freedom’s waters with a love lost bait
Man’s despotism inflicted over my poached body
Your hubris allows one perfect bite on fleshy familiarity
Suffocating in palms of air as you debate torture regiments
Heart of sigmoid behind my eyes near the brain
I think you’re seeing it now
You admired me in the water to doom a quick love
Thoughts of preservation come second to your ego
Feed by my thrill
A seashore rarity but queen of my castle
Drag me atop your pathetic boat to plan my fate
Finning isn’t suitable, taxidermy is your speciality
Bowels in or out?
Pulverized with seasoned mallets my blanched meat
Hollowed down to the least frighten parts
Count my teeth as lesions on your leg
Dumped on the lip while touches play with my skin
Smear my predatory gaze with pocket knives
Malnourished while fish hooks link in my ribs
Display me upside down in a humiliation ritual
Empty mouth dangling open
Curate my appearance to fit an unfulfilled lifestyle
Just let me be fucking cool
My legends outweighed my existence
Valuable as a gilded trophy to sit upon a hunter’s mantle
Have I made you a wanted man?
I was violent it was the right call
If you hadn’t captured me I would have killed you to prove I could
Becoming the prolific sadist that slips inside your skin
Puppeteering you with each nerve ending
Being your prize will cost my vitality
Live without my life, may my body suffice.

These deciduous paths
I have known for two decades
Keeps me grounded in the hills
Of ancient Appalachia
And I fear that if I venture
Farther away to new paths
And new lands
I won’t find my way back
I’ll be lost forever

To the hills, the trees, the forests, the people, the culture
That raised me, that taught me
To appreciate everything within my reach
Everything outside our windows

Where did all the Blue Jays go?
The trees are thin and bare
Their songs are but a memory
And no-one seems to care
Did they find someplace better?
That lacks this hollow shell
Did they disappear without a trace?
Or a soft farewell
I know there’s something missing on the branches of this town
Oh, what I’d give to hear again that whisper of a sound
The silence screams to all who feel as if they don’t belong
One day I swear I’ll go to where the blue jays all have gone

The sea is the ultimate teacher within our reach

Even if I dedicated my entire life to a sober,
disciplined study of consciousness, meaning,
and fulfillment—I could barely map 10%
of the domain. I want

to be a shark.

I want to be an angler fish.
I want to be a thermal vent,
nourishing shrimp and other life so far
removed from the sun’s influence
that photosynthesis could stop
and my brood and I would go on.
I want to be the center of the Earth.

I want to sleep so hot
and so intensely that
the planet only survives
by my good graces.

I want to be silt, salt, and sand. Foamy
and only a strange preview of a complexity
that presents innocuous
while capable of crushing
every machine humanity
has ever manufactured
just by the nature
of my being. I’m embarrassed

to be a person.

I want to cultivate love, even
for the parts of me
who want to cultivate resentment.

I have had a pretty great life,
even if the great parts
have been unexpected.

I love my brain, my heart, my lungs, and my spinal column
despite the trouble
they can sometimes cause. But I am ready

to let them go when the time comes.

There is a committee inside the body
and it’s unclear when
the members are influencing me.

I want to accept all the truth
and wisdom from every continent
intelligence surmounts every boundary
just as every body is designed
to handle death.

I want to look
angry and dangerous
without realizing
anyone is looking. I want
my nature
to be
crash and nurture
absorb, digest
and cultivate,
swallow and breed.

I want to be a black hole.
I want to be the hazy expanse
of a new star. I want to be
the burnt-out sun.

I want to be two galaxies
entangled, following gravity’s logic,
indifferent to the consequences, indifferent
to the causes. I want to be the white-hot star
before it collapses and the new
universe

on the other side of the event horizon. I want to be the fabric of time,
the dark matter, the anti-matter, and the dimensions themselves.

The heat death. The absences.
The purpose, stripped of its illusions. The truth
that is only true while it is stuck in your teeth,
before some carnivore
ejects it, along with fish parts, waste,
and digestive enzymes
after it has vibrated

with the first atoms before light,
before time, before the dust
got the idea to become rocks
before vapor became drops.

The brain is doing its own thing.
Projecting images within folds,
guessing at where the dressing ends,
nurturing the wound, neglecting the gauze.

The brain has its own time.
You can’t learn kung fu in an instant
but the brain will take an instance
where you missed the hint
and shove it into your face for as long as you live.

Your brain is not your own.
You are a growth protruding
from reality’s constant experimentation on itself.
You’re lucky you’ve ever been
happy once. You’re lucky you were born
with enough good fortune that you made it
to 13 before your first real suicidal inclination.

Your family is lucky you barely had any idea
how to act on your urges. Your family is lucky
you didn’t have the internet back then.

Your brain is like if the universe is paying
a small amount of attention
to an infinitesimal droplet
of its own, glowing life
while it’s on the phone,
watching a YouTube video,
and setting some of itself on fire.

Your brain knows what you should say,
but only in its own, sad little theater.

And even then, it could be wrong.

It is a supremely imperfect
computational machine

stuck in the gums
of an eldritch creature swimming
in waters deep enough to crush
a rhinoceros skull.

Charred trees remain
from a fire twenty years ago – a dying
memorial. Bird song floats
over their graves. Some people plant trees

to mark as a tombstone, yet we do not achnowledge
these stumps as ghosts. Smoke lingers
over us from Yosemite’s fire,
and I wonder: how many graves will stand there

(and how many will be cherished
as such)? How many have fallen
miles away, never
to be thought of again?

Tonight, I light
a candle for the downed trees
and remember the soft heartbeat of a blazing
wildfire.

Yesterday it was here.
Now it’s not.

I’d been looking at it.

It was on the milkweed
here by the porch,
its rounded, slightly raised
oval body almost translucent
in the late afternoon sun,
its ink lines of legs
impossibly sensitive,
impossibly long.

Two boys in a field,
all grass and weeds,
sharing a jar full of bees.

Softly, quietly, small goddess
in flight – we stole her life

– trapped her in a bee jar.
We closed the lid

and they ripped her apart.

Do they watch us with a billion blinking eyes?
As if our existence is too much for them to comprehend.

Do they stare in gaping awe and marvel at the only other beings in the
universe who can look back at them and wonder?

Do the stars count us? Do they number and name us? Group us together in
vague shapes and tell stories of our creation like constellations?

Is there anything out there with eyes to see us and a heart to love us?

Will some higher being pity us enough to save us from ourselves? Our own
extinction? Surely we must be on someone s endangered species list.

I want with all my heart to believe the stars are a promise of our future.
Some great god s gift to us, a glimpse of what we may become.

I fear they may just be the memory of someone else s past, echos of
lives once lived. Glimmering fragmented dreams dimming. After all even
light fades away. Even a star has an end.

I suspect both may be true and all that remains of anything is a glimmer,
a shadow then darkness, lost within the expanding void between of suns.

Green breath, nature’s pulse
Existence for the sake of what?
A woodpecker feeds, a metronome
Squirrels scamper and bounce
A branch falls, heavy winds destruction
Shattering a cars mirror
Destruction, production
Weeping sap for syrup
Warnings its friends with mycelium
If simple existence is their purpose,
Could there be unknown intention?
Existence with lack of purpose
Would that breed positivity?
Or is chaos the true order
No rhyme or reason
Fundamentally, existence is good.
Instinct wants us to live
Yet humans live to create
Through creation we destroy
So instinct led us to destruction
If existence is instinct,
Existence is also destruction.
Branches of understanding
Always changing with the leaves.
We’re not meant to comprehend, but to climb.

You filled my hunger, and I tore you down,
While you soothed my senses with your endless blue skies.
I smeared your beauty with my dirt,
And though you give without end,
I am a human with consciousness of gods ,
Yet I have learned no gratitude.

You gave me the river’s song, the forest’s breath,
The gentle warmth of the sun, the shade of the tree.
I took it all without a thought,
Harvesting your gifts with greed and haste,
Leaving scars where once there was peace.

Instead, I steal from you with all my might,
Ripping at your heart, blind to your pain.
I ravage your lands, destroy your soul
I am a thankless child,
And you, Mother Nature,
The giver of all,
Suffering silently under my hands?

When my soul feels empty,
I drift, lost in search,
Chasing questions, swallowed by doubt,
Blind to the answers that lie within you.
Do I not see the truth you offer—
The giving, the unconditional love?

Your grace endures, even when I falter,
Yet I cannot seem to learn.
For I have forgotten how to truly see you

For in your beauty, I see only what I can take,
And in your silence, I hear only what I have broken.
Will you ever forgive me mother ?
Says your lost child!