Poem-A-Day #166 : Wood (Part 13 : Collapse)

WOOD!!!! Read Part One HERE.


Wood (Part 13 : Collapse)

Think about sand and how it gets in to everything it is near : kudzu does this : there are weed trees like Chinese Elm that rip open the world beneath the ground and tear up the stones of our walkways : there was tree in my backyard it was an apricot tree it tore open the sewer pipes and my backyard erupted in a monsoon of shit :

This is why we make wood into furniture : we need to tame it to control it to have it not be so wild : you could argue that humanity does that to everything : but we don't turn most things into something we put our asses on : nature is scary it is the only thing that could destroy us completely :

So we geometry out of it : pull it from the earth and turn it into grids and plots and eventually we cultivate it into things we want more than what it was : we table it until such a time as we forget it needed to be tabled :

I don't know what started the fire last night : there was a fire last night : the swarm of things that make up a building began to unravel and pull apart : a vine suddenly releasing its holds and falling from the wall into a heap at your feet :

Collapse :

Poem-A-Day #163 : Wood (Part 10 : GMO)

Get into it. Read Part One HERE.


Wood (Part 10 : GMO)

The doors always get splintered : in horror movies I mean : Jack Nicholson pushing that wide meaty face of his through the axe hole : machetes in the dark arrows that manage to not only come through the thickness of the door but also through a body against it : wood is culpable it involves itself in these things and it seems to be ok with that :

Or maybe this is the result of cultivation and domestication and processing : who knows the full extent of that process anyway : there was an article or a meme it's hard to distinguish any longer about how humans show all the signs of a domesticated species : and the question arises who is it that domesticated us and the answer is plants :

And I know that we can talk about self-domestication and all of that and we can have a good laugh about the idea that plants use us to propagate and to fertilize and that we even bury our dead to make them more healthy in the long term : but for a moment that's a beautiful idea : plants have essentially also used us to be more active in their existence :

Phytochemicals : that's the stuff that attracts and repels us : and plants evolved to have these things and the plants we cultivate are ones that have the ones we like : sneaky plants : I know what you're thinking : this is coincidence plants don't give a fig about us : but they do : remember we evolved along with them it isn't a vacuum :

In those specials narrated by David Attenborough he always talks about the connections between things in nature : this bird evolved to have this kind of beak to eat from this kind of flower or to use this kind of grass to knit this kind of nest : in the one about humans that should probably exist he would talk about humans evolving aside plants and animals and the interplay between :

And then we'd hit the age of cities and that process would stop cold : or : more accurately : it would become one of humanity using it as a tool to speed up the process : I'm sure we'd call that genetic modification and we'd want to slap labels all over it but the reality is that we've been doing it for eons : the first person to selectively breed corn to have larger sweeter kernels was a geneticist :

Intellectually it's there : but I'm sure there's a flaw in what I'm saying and honestly I don't care all that much my humanity and existence isn't tied to being right or academic : it's a nice idea and that in the end is that : give me the beauty over the rightness : back to those splintering doors : how long must it take the survivor to clean that shit up :