​hair an unborn rain color
lips a flower-breath festival
eyes a double sunset
 
fingers in winter sift firewood ash
to rescue spent nails from common burial
 
feet in spring re-search back alleys
where hands scavenge
rusted bolts broken blades small tangles of wire
 
a whole-body finale
upon the strike of midsummer's noon
charges its garden
armed with a double-handled digger
 
twelve holes later under stinging shower
she circles and begins a wait
for the new of the next moon
 
at that exact moment by lantern light
she feeds in her yearly steel-crumb collection
backfills each hole with drooling soil then
celebrates with raisins
and juicy pitted prunes
 
she nourishes the earth she must
because some men
have bled its metal out
 
she nurses the earth she must
because she must
 
so she reaches a fist out to the night
pulling in a positive charge then
 
amused by its sudden gravity in her chest
tunnels through her unlit house
all the way to the mirror
to laugh at the image
of a servant who drops to her knees
on warm mornings
and fingers the globe like a rosary bead


​First published in January 2022 in Tiny Seed Literary Journal

​I just now overheard a scholar dismiss all the life in this entire universe as a random occurrence birthed from chaos. 
 
Really?
 
And his rationale for the irrefutable reality and benign complexity of our life-giving earth: “Well, it’s like we’re riding a winning lottery ticket.”
 
Indeed?
 
Then explain to me the unfathomable depth in a human tear. How the one sourcing the tear is in instant communion with every being who has ever cried out in pain or joy.  
 
Justify how synchronicity, déjà vu, joie de vivre, and the innate drive to be empathic can be reduced to chemical reactions. 
 
Clarify why the new physics is on a mission to de-camouflage the soul of the cosmos. Account for the existence of the word—and pervasiveness of the permanent human infatuation with—soul.
 
Enlighten us how it is possible that existence is a one-in-a-trillion chance when mathematicians have proven that the timeline probability of the evolution of just one simple enzyme found in the human body would take far longer than the known age of the universe. Defend the evolution of the other 75,000 enzymes and how they accidentally work in concert.
 
Use your logic to clarify why there is something rather than nothing. And why you are, rather than why you are not.
 
Now, when you’re exhaustedly emptied of cluttered and circular explanations, sit outside and commune with a star, a pebble, even the air, and reflect honestly upon the trite nature of your arguments. 
 
Then, if you dare, set your last remnant of jaded arrogance aside, and you’ll have proven your destiny as a bona fide winner. 
 
Indeed.

​I wish my worn mind would wax morphic 
so to slip unnoticed into the tableau 
of chimpanzees asleep in the trees
 
Or enter a houseful of dogs and 
know at which corner of the carpet
I am welcome to lie
 
I want to fiddle like a cricket in a morphic field
surrounded with so much flora
I learn each plant’s ultimate mission
 
Or go into bear mind to get wind of
the original quirk that led to 
the very first hibernation
 
I want to sit in the center of a grove of trees 
and breathe together in prolonged yoga
while the stories in their rings enter my vertebrae
 
Or swim for days along the seashore   
and be force fed by rays and pelicans
until my own salty blood trades places with seawater
 
I want to climb a hard mountain
to touch the soft sky
all to confirm: When I don’t think—I am
 
                                                                        
                         (This poem first appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Kosmos Quarterly)

"Started out, for god knows where..."
- Tom Petty

one day we arose homo erectus spending a mere million years to decide not just to stay standing but to ponder and chew roots and walk north at the same time not seeing the writing on the labyrinth wall because back over our shoulder we now homo sapiens could still see the entrance yet at one of the early turns—maybe a snowstorm or a tiger—we tried turning tail back toward the cradle but too many behind were pushing us since roots and fruits were running thin we went for the insects then small mammals noting how hard stone could not only knock out a big beast but some softer lumps could graffiti the walls and others made sparks to light up the labyrinth and keep us warm speaking of which we grunted and gestured then by god spoke and passed around the bright idea that skins were smart party attire as even the dorothies among us realized we weren’t in jungleland anymore and we took only a hundred thousand years this time and myriad attempts at maze navigation to realize planting bunches of the sweet seeds we’d been eating grew a whole crop straight out of the floor and nobody forecast the accident that heating those sparkly rocks in the fire released their secrets into sharp weapons and blunt tools yes we liked some of the goods from the group across the river as they—craving our dodo-bird jerky—started talking trade so the first tycoons grouped us in large camps where we tried on clout and warrior outfits to protect our stores none of us grasping we were up to our eyeballs in civilization and in our forward march through these halls we never bid goodbye to the bushmen pygmies berbers busy as we were pushing ourselves into new corridors donning the garb of canaanites of dravidians while waving back toward africa while we outbred neanderthals while inbreeding with goths while rounding corners to become hindus whose ancestor (really us) banished the monguls (also us) to the icy chamber where they kicked their outcasts (us) through the wall out to the siberian bridge—still in the greater maze—to become beringians who had to run in place five millennia for the big thaw to keep walking south or east to become us paleo-indian-people hoping for that glimpse of africa while evolving inside the labyrinth to become the likes of iroquois and seminole and apache and aztec and inca and maya—while back in the belly of eurasia we summerians ignored we etruscans who poo pooed we slavs—as we vikings begat celts who spanked us romans who thank some god or other had no clue the aboriginals were being transplanted by alien space farmers to mingle with the polynesians we kicked out of pre-taiwan but we drowned it all out with awe-full squeals when the Red Sea engulfed pharoah’s army not at the death but the sheer spectacle and who knew the romans would get religion and briefly stall the moors with crusades while every pre-gandhi type became self-blindfolded when it was mis-understood that certain lives were more valuable yes this remains a dead end causing all style of extinctions through the labyrinth plaguing us to this day yes even amidst the genocidal darknesses war paused for the grecian olympics yes the enlightenment lifted our spirits (until it didn’t) yes we late-bloomer maasai keep our color to this day yes original optimism of we ottomans fractured like a fallen sculpture yes we incas burned hot & bright then were doused out even as we died in the plagues until we evolved antidote-finding geniuses followed all too soon by the mad echoes of our screams at the stupidity of trench warfare screams with hunger in the mighty depression screams on the beaches of france screams over viet nam screams at the beatles rescue effort screams for the death of camelot and doctor king screams falling from the twin towers joyful screams as iceland gave us shelter all these cries crescendo-ing when we knew our kind would continue pushing through our self-built labyrinth but this is an extra test altogether this no ordinary dead end bees die on our crops sea creatures choke on collective plastic vomit poisons march hard on the biosphere even sea salt is unclean now there’s this virusy damn thorny protein demon teaching our tissue to host it and multiply (helluva design goddie) so we leave notes in niches in the labyrinth walls a sick extinction tribute so let us shoulder our bag of slim hopes and stand on our heads in the halls at the laughable belief in corporate endangerment upside down in a pose beyond hope hungering for a hollywood ending as precious blood rushes into our heads just maybe causing a collective magical-thinking hemorrhage wherein we coax the end-times invader onto our most comely surface  trick it to mutate until it turns on itself  evolves benignly or dies astonishingly because unobserved: like human like virus

Simple Evolution

I used to see it one way
 
The world’s secret?
 
Not complicated
I’d say:
 
You’re born
You grow up
You learn—a lot
You self express
You croak
 
But I’ve changed
 
Now it’s even more simple:
 
I’m born
I grow
I learn
I express
I croak
 
In each moment