THE GREEN CHOIR
I lost myself in the marsh
Heard a green song
Lost some bones
To that green choir
A plant-throated supplicant begged
With my voice
And a panther
Dew-slick
Gauze-covered eyes
Walked with no human wound
Moistening its taut back
Kill or be killed
The big bang dropped us in it
The big microscope priests
Pressed onus into every cell
With sermon and surreptitiousness
Respectively
I bent my head loamward
To eat some seed
Craned wildly my unbreakable neck
My body flashed gold
Into the Gauze Panther’s cotton-covered eyes
And the panther crouched
Inside me
Waiting for the smell
My first carnage dive
Found dirt in my nose
Inhaled ground up
Entered my head helically
A popped thought wasabi
The clarity of a clean green breath
Breathed in at the genetic level
The marsh writhed inside me
One century: a ball of worms slick and mating
One century: a menagerie of ice bright lightning
This century: a manufactured rumble
Envelops the big air
In a flimsy plastic microwave package
And the loam sucks in
Humidly
For a growlA planet growl—
Planet, the word itself a collaboration
Conjoining phonemes
Can you even say it without heaving?
Even you
With your ludic glasses
Can you really hold a word that naked
In your holy mouth?
THE TWO OF US
I wake naked
And the planet wakes
Naked with me
Once a writhing orgy
Of membrane on membrane
Without caring why
Now my thigh crevasses itch
My hot hair itches
The antlers
Strapped to my head
Are a violent helmet
I hide underneath
They whisper to me
In a bone syntax
I can’t understand
The golden gazing Gauze Panther
Found me again
Pinned me to the ground
With their arcing dewclaws
Their sandpaper tongue runs
Against my hairy nipple
This morning
Euphoric boredom
When I knew they wouldn’t kill me
I forgot slow
Could be this empty
Without fear
O how the marsh laughed
Danced at the base of the bonfire
Fire ant hill for feet
Lilly pad for waist
Mango root ribs caging
Hearts beating in spider webs
A symbiosis ink can't cover over
No the gauze are not over my eyes
There was water for the kelp
On the pond’s shore they fell near
After the first vernal explosion
That shore dried and the kelp became ravenous
I pet the dirt on all fours
I bite it softly
Soil falling out of mouth
My new green limbs dull to brown
The kelp does not care
If I live or die
I apologize to nothing for nothing