Daily Archives: August 11, 2013

Storm

Defense
against.  Offense
against.  
Siege in progress.

These colors don’t run,
these walls hold fast,  these weapons 
never have an opportunity
to rust.

Smell the iron on the wind:
whose blood is that?

Close edge of the surrounding wood —
two does, one fawn,
peering out of darkness under
the pines.

Rain on the wind, 
wall of nimbus behind the trees.
Two soldiers crying now
as they have not till now.  

Why cry? Comrades,
the storm is made to refresh us — 
be washed, be ready, 

for the deer
have just fled back
under the pines.

 


Gourmands

What we’ve been eating is mostly
fictional — no, that’s not it.

What we’ve been eating is mostly
lazy precooked and flash frozen —

that’s more like it, that’s true enough,
but not quite what I want to say about it.

What we’ve been eating is what we are.
A tangled cliche?  They become cliche 

for a reason: they’re true. Follow it:
what we’ve been eating is colonialism’s fodder.

What we have been eating
is utterly simplified and dumbed down.

What we’ve been eating is killing us?
Of course it is.  The essence of the dying diet

is that we’re told to eat to survive and enjoy and delight
and it’s all empty and we end up hollow —

ah, almost there, on top of it, yes —
we are what we eat

and what we’ve been eating
are lies.