Leaves gather like un- sold goods. Need help, asks the rake. Just browsing, I say.
Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong.
We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls.
Heaven would be a room strewn with books
and nary an errand to distract from reading;
“Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz…” – CNN
I dream a rocket’s aftermath smells of cracked pepper,
that it sprays not blood and shrapnel but mint leaves,
ice clinking in delicate hand-blown glass; that its
thunder is a hundred-thousand bumblebees come to
pollinate a black-and-white world, devoid of flowers…
Don’t shoot the rats pillaging dumpsters,
or the man with rat-like eyes and rumpled
suit, who orders they be set ablaze…
Not the shaded table by the pool
where I point out a hummingbird eating nectar
and my son asks, “You mean like I eat pizza?”
I remember coffee-flavored ice cream at the Royal Scoop,
how it made me long to be old enough to drink espresso
like Dad. I remember stepping off the plane into the sweet
humid air, the tissue-paper feel of the Lei around my neck,
Is it wrong to love this world like a newborn swaddled in peach skin, beech-tree bark, silt at the mouth of a stream whose headwater is starlight, is ocean-honey, is upwell of grief? World we once called mother, how we […]
I’ve come to take for granted so much–billboards and product
placements, sponsored posts disguised as honest-to-goodness
journalism, apps making me the product I can search and…
I’ll be brief, for we are both busy
and the calendar Gods have laid waste to
that idyllic peace which, if we’re honest,
is as foreign to our forebears as to us.
But the thing
about the apologue
of the frog in boiling water
is that it’s scientifically false