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.

what they started with: willow. willow bark for smoke
and for pain. tie the young branches into circles 
and it’s for play, the children understanding the circle
and joy therein.  you could do worse than start with willow.
there is grace in willow, willow allows us our interpretation of willow —

unlike oak, stony oak, granite oak always itself.
the tree presenting as rock. smell broken oak and you know at once
it’s more mineral than tree.  make up stories about oak, pretend to know it
at your peril.  even they only came to oak
once they’d mastered willow and birch and apprenticed to maple;

you can’t come straight at oak or it will snap you up.  
you need to know these things.  pretty soon they may be
the only allies we have left, the ones who get trees the way they get
us, the ones who look like us but don’t scare as easily.  you need to know
what they know about trees and how concrete fails when challenged by roots.

not going to suggest you’ll ever be one of them but with any luck
they may deign to let you survive.  maybe get to know willow, a few words of it
at the least: joy, smoke, pain, circles. no one knows if that will be enough
but it will be a start.  and no, i’m not coming with you.  it’s a little late for me
and someone has to hang back and listen to the concrete scream.

I would love you more,
my activist, my firebrand,
if you could allow all of me in;

if I detected anything more
to your passion than a lust
for right pegs in right holes,

if I thought you truly loved people 
for the complex, contradictory,
dense ghosts they are

and not as you wish they were:
symbolic husks, bullets in your
slide deck on what’s wrong with the world.

Apparently,
failure is delicious;
so many of my hungry neighbors
seem to wait for it to show up
then dive upon it open-mouthed,
wet-jawed.

I can’t share that appetite,
perhaps because there have been
so many times when my own tongue
on my own skin caught a trace
of that flavor, and I looked up
and saw myself as prey.

The failures start screaming
as the raveners approach.
I do my best to get between them
but then I wake up. There’s a
taste in my mouth that’s worse
than normal, or maybe it is normal.

August and it’s clear
that she’s aiming for autumn again:
dark in the early morning again,
dark in the early evening again. 

If you asked Gaia
what it feels like
as she turns through a solstice,

would she sniffle a bit
at how comet-hearted,
hard-headed time was treating you,

or would she point to Australia
and say 

it’s their turn now so stop whining.
How quickly you’ve gone sour,
nature lover, now that your turn
is ending.

Tomorrow, it will be
dark in the early evening, 
dark in the early morning — 
much as it was here today,
and it will be the same in Perth
as it is here.  

Gaia moves,
the Wheel moves;

you should prepare
for coming cold 
as your doppelganger in Perth
should get ready for summer;

your crestfallen sense
of wasted time should be balanced 
by your double’s joy in anticipation;

and you both should know
that to Gaia neither will make
the least bit of difference.

A formal peace
has descended upon me
after rejecting bondage
by my own expectations: for example,

daylight outside keeps changing
from clouded to bright.  Because
I had no television on this morning
I did not expect this.

Nothing that it is happening
has been anticipated.  I am free
to just react and then act.  I am free
because of refusal to do

what I always do. Stubborn
rebellion against what is expected,
no matter how small, is called for.
Living as others do is uncalled for

in a land of quiet desperation.
Every third person is dying
from slow suicide.  Yes, I may end up
dead more swiftly this way. Ah, well.

I let it fall.

When it hits
it leaves a mark — 
a canyon in fact,

one so deep I’m never going to get
to the bottom of the damage
it’s left behind, but at least
I don’t have to carry it anymore —

God,
it was the size of the sky,
the color of old blood,
and how it stank.

I’ve let it fall
and there’s nothing 
on my shoulders now — 

my lightened,
lonely shoulders.

All you have is trajectory
to sell you:

clear arc from
yesterday to now;

clean framing line
in mid-air revealing

origin, path, and
predicting destination;

but what are you now,
in the moment?  Freeze

a second, long enough
for us to see your eyes

and the lines around your mouth;
are they from laughter or anger?

Let us see because assuming
based on trajectory is not

sufficient.  Face us for once
as that arc behind you is smoke

and no one can tell
if you’re still on fire.

what I was 
keeps breaking
what I am

what I was
reminds me
I’m not whole

what shall be
terrifies
what I was

what I was  
terrorizes
what I am

what will be
never minds
what I want

what I want
is to be
what I am

while never caring
for the pain
of what I was