APIARY

Just decide one day

to buy some, some

bees, and begin.

Bring them home.

Keep them.

Take them in,

into your heart, your lungs.

Become the buzzing,

let the honey be your blood.

Wake each morning and say:

I am the Beekeeper.

Today I make dreams,

honeycomed and hived.

THE STICK AND THE SNAKESKIN

Don’t keep poking at it.

Leave it be.

                                                              

It’ll turn to dust

in its own time.

The life this shed flesh

once clung to

has moved on,

you should too.

Let die in you

what needs to die.

Leave it like a rind

by the side of the road.

STRANGE PASTURE

     after Robert Rauschenberg

A taxidermist had already done his handiwork

when you came along and rescued me 

from a New York City shop window.

You cleaned me up, tended to my fleece,

married me with a tire,

daubed my snout with acrylics of many colors,

installed me at the center of a canvas on the floor

adorned with the detritus of the everyday: 
a strange pasture.

I became part painting, part sculpture.

A Combine, you called me.

An enigma open to interpretation.

Here I stand, your most famous survivor,
facing modernity like a monogram 
stitched into the tarpaulin of time.

MISALIGNMENT

We are meant to look after
our own damn selves,
to make our way through the world
standing tall, heads held high, 
strutting our perfect postures.
If we do this then
form follows function.
If we don’t and we acquiesce
to the needs and will of others–
if we let them choose our way for us—
we are like atrophied muscles
that enlist less capable neighbors
to do our heavy lifting.
And when we do our bodies
fall quickly out of alignment,
their inherent design
compromised, and balance
is only a muscle memory.