I am a dark-feathered duck,
Back to the current,
Blinded to where it all leads
But content to sit in its lap.
I know that you are waiting
Across the other side,
And our no-reception phone-calls sound like Satan
Bleating down the line,
But give it time, I’m sure you’ll see
That I’ll wait for you and you for me,
And we will stand among these trees,
Roots tied together with hearts set free.
But, yes, for now we lie in prisons,
These great iron bars blocking our vision,
And every “Bonne nuit” feels like an incision
Into our troubled minds.
Excuse me please, for these brief reprieves
Where I must leave your soul
For my selfish seas, oceans
Receding, my sentinels retreating
And I am submitting to your endless grace
Breaking through the clouds
With the elegance of a plow
After winter when the wombats come out,
Shake their twitching snouts and find a way to live,
To thrive, to let this rhyme wander,
For I can no longer ponder
The form before the meaning
The storm before the lightning,
My chest is tightening, strapped to a jet-pack
And fuck the city I’m not coming back,
Human? Or consume and be done with the rest,
Surely this is not the best that we can do,
The point that we can prove:
That we’re not made of metal
That we beat and we bruise
And we’re not going to settle
For well-trodden paths with
Success charted on graphs,
And if I must leave my degree
To come and see, then so be it,
I’d rather roam than sit
Or Paris or Morocco
Or any and all of it,
Let’s pack our cosmic van and go,
And if we end up broke,
Choking on our indiscretions
‘Tis better to have lived in debt
Than by their moral lessons.
But,
That cool stream caressing now,
Rolling off of my back and into my bowels;
The devil’s undressing, the rapids are rushing
As I am waiting for my earth to give way.
Sweetly Unhappy People 