End of the World in the Big Lots Parking Lot

I had a dream the other night where Dua Lipa was giving a concert in the parking lot of a big box store that was on fire. She performed next to large shipping containers while we all sat on ratty lawn chairs. They were green and white plaid.

There's something to be said about not giving into despair even in the face of certain doom. Dance in the parking lot. Be the band on the Titanic, play until the water takes you.

As I turn the dream, and the metaphor of the band, over in my head, I realize that the metaphors for perseverance that I know seem to no longer work. In the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century we are so accustomed to playing until we can physically no longer go on that the very idea of not doing it is strange to consider. There are so many swords hanging over us that the sky is all sharp points.

The world is ending and we will still have our fun. And the waters will rise around us and we will continue until we can't and that is just true. We've been playing and the water has been rising. For decades. So what does one do with a broken metaphor when the water is still coming?

A broken platitude or metaphor becomes a zombie saying. Something that we all understand but is so divorced from itself that silence would be better. I don't believe that meaning can be reattached once it's lost. Broken things can only be assembled in a simulacrum of the original. And the new meaning will always be there as well. Maybe we're way passed sayings being helpful anyway.

In the dream, we danced and had fun while the building burned. On the Titanic the band really did keep playing. We even think we know what song was the last played.

I leap to thinking about individual vs collective responsibility. How we put up blinders to both protect ourselves and to turn off our responsibility. I lived in New York long enough that I tend to walk by people with their hands out on the street. This isn't a ding against cities, it's an acknowledgement that to live in the US today, you have to find ways to exist. Sometimes existing means ignoring those who are struggling more than you because if you stop to try and help all of them, you will go under yourself.

If there were to be an idealized takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be that we find a more concrete version of collective responsibility. A better version. One where we can openly discuss the lines between personal, individual responsibility, and the greater collective one.

This is obviously not happening.

One look at the news will point out that many, possibly most, have instead found a more insidious shade of righteous selfishness in the aftermath. A truly lost opportunity if there ever was one in modern history.

It's inviting to make a claim like "we owe each other more than this", but it's a bit of a false narrative. The collective good should outweigh the personal unless it will cause harm. Ultimately we owe ourselves to be better. But seeing that is difficult. Forest for the trees - which is a metaphor that still works. Though a metaphor where the original version was "he who sees no wood for trees" which has a totally different connotation to the modern version.

The individual isn't really capable of change at the level needed anyway. Unless you are incredibly wealthy, most individuals are only capable of small changes. The big stuff, the putting out the fire stuff, takes a group working as one. And the putting out the big fires, takes governments, the rich, and corporations. If the world around us just pops back to pre-pandemic ways, it's hard to push against that when you need an ever increasing in cost roof over your head. It's a question of scale. Where is the line between what I can do and what I cannot?

It's a gray area that is dependent on the person doing the work and the work needing to be done. And again, the good being done amplifies the more people working towards it.

An example of sorts: It has been drilled into the public that it is up to us to fix climate change. Drive less, recycle more, get a bike, use less plastic, eat a plant-based died, cut down on beef, etc etc etc. Every major drive to course correct on climate change that I've witnessed in my lifetime has focused on the personal level. And personal, small scale, change does help, just not at a scale that impacts the massive undertaking in front of us. We are way passed volunteering to clean up a roadside as a means to impact the climate.

When you learn that BP invented the concept of the personal carbon footprint and sold it to the world as a means to distract from their corporate culpability it's hard to take any of the things that individuals do to combat climate change seriously. Corporations have spent billions convincing us that we are to shoulder the weight of many aspects of modern life that are simply out of our hands.

The attitude that only we can change things, that we must because governments and corporations will not has bled throughout culture. It is a broken social contract. You can see the results in the US in the disintegration of public trust for institutions. The obvious, dangerous, endpoints that spiral out of this inward focus can be seen in events minor to international. Not wearing a mask to dumping trash on the side of the road to storming a capitol building.

The tirelessness of continuing to carry on in the face of all of this is supposedly virtuous. An attempt to stem some kind of tide. But in 2022 it feels like this concept has been boiled down into a strange parody of itself. Working 10-hour days 6 days a week with no time off is virtue. Today, going down with the ship means holding onto the computer keyboard so you can get that report out before the waves get you.

I'm not advocating for giving up. But the energy needs to be refocused onto those who can actually effect change at scale. The billionaires, the governments, the corporations.

Obviously there is a movement to correct some this going on - at least in the workplace. Unions are once again rising in the US, and wages seem to be going up in a real way for the first time in decades. People are talking about work life balance in ways that aren't about optimizing their time off. Real discussions are happening. But it is hard not to be cynical about what will occur in the next 18 months as the US and the world moves further out of pandemic mode. Toxic patterns that have been hard-wired are hard to break and we've been here before.

Underestimating the power of the wealthy and corporations to reaffirm their dominance even in the face of immense tragedy is a losing game. Every single one of the band members on the Titanic died that night. Only 3 of the 8 bodies were found. And the company that did the booking for the White Star Line sent a bill for the lost uniforms to the grieving families. Public outrage led to those bills being voided, but they should never have been sent in the first place.

Corporations should not be considered people under the law. Their money should be out of politics. They should have limits on the demands to their employees. Billionaires should not exist full stop. Governments should not be afraid of saying these things, or of acting on these issues. And all the above should be the ones being asked to make the largest sacrifices to protect the world around us.

I'm all for shaming the devil. So let's fucking dance. Let's focus on the small things we can do. Let's pick up a bucket and toss some water on the fire in front of us. But let's also think about how and when the fire started and who is responsible for putting it out completely.

RELATED READING:

• Sweetest Pie // Megan Thee Stallion & Dua Lipa
• Musicians of the Titanic
• The Damaging Myth of Individual Culpability // Alison Heslin
• The Dangerous Myth of the Individual Carbon Footprint // Tabitha Whiting

Poem-A-Day #333 : Narrative

Narrative

Toss - the match - right ? - I mean -
the fucker deserves to go up in flames
and God - I am tired - of sympathy -
so let's get this over with

Poem-A-Day #325 : On the Evening Before the Inauguration of the 45th President of the United States

On the Evening Before the Inauguration of the 45th President of the United States

The cold has sat on my face - holed up
in the caves of my sinuses

I sleep - wake
sit with the cat
an endless stream of movies runs by

I feel as though I am waiting for someone to come home

I have strange sentimental thoughts about an ex-boyfriend
and almost text him
but do not - and this proves something

I fall asleep and miss the sunset - it is the night and it is cold outside
the snow from last week melts and turns into mud

I found a patch of rust on the hood of my car this morning
a pock or orange-red amid the green - it is rough to the touch
it is probably spreading - I think about ways to patch it

Are there patches

I noticed that the cat is walking stiffly - that
age is creeping in him

Age is creeping everywhere

I math - I will be 39 in 2020 - the cat will be 17
will possibly not be here - will have turned into glass

On the eve of my 40th birthday will I know where I am

There is a progression of things - I told my class today
write towards the future
because whatever you write will date the second it is done
and the future needs you in ways the present does not

A moment of folding occurs

Tonight the world will go to sleep and I will not set an alarm
at 9:30 in the morning things will occur that I will not see
paths before us will have quietly lessened - and multiplied

Poem-A-Day #319 : Oracle 1990s

Oracle 1990s

In the 90s - a sense of end times - the fall
of airplane engines from the sky

We would hoard water until we had no place to sleep -

There was that drill - under your desk - hands
up and over your head - head
down and in your lap

The same thing for tornadoes - useless -

A sense that oral sex could only occur in the Oval Office - that
everything was going to get worse before it got Star Trek -

You used to be able to see the horizon - now. . .

Poem-A-Day #314 : The Voices Of The Dead Only Say The Things We Make Them Say

The Voices Of The Dead Only Say The Things We Make Them Say

A book flips open
a random page
painted over and over
with the faces of your dead

An alphabet of ghosts
the words of the novel
replaced with
their eyes

Just last night
the book had been
about a woman
solving a murder
in some small
Irish town

Who signifies 'A'
and who got the 'X'
is perhaps a sort of
shade thrown wildly
in several directions

Is this psychology
a clever trick
of the dire mind

You sit in the chair
and by oranging light
you attempt to see
a thing in these lines

Graves are closed mouths
books in theory are
the vessels of dead who
cannot help but speak

Yet
these faces only want
to recount how
this woman discovered
whodunnit

They only stand for letters
they sentence plot
metaphor fails them
but they have emotional climax
and denounment for you

An ending that in some sense
could satisfy all that came before

Poem-A-Day #312 : Pyrite

Pyrite

Let the record show that we were at least genuine - in some things - that the field of ourselves was sewn with attempts towards beauty

at times it was fallow and covered in snow - and in those times the seeds could relax - they could - wheat rests in ice to grow for early summer - can this not also be true of ourselves

I know the arguments for and against - the sighting of the hawk fighting the raven over the rabbit - there is a wheel that we are tied to

it perpetually takes us under water - rocks us against the spokes - winnows us - separates bone from meat

Field metaphors are about growth and death and cycles - they crop up like weeds in the words of great and lesser poets - they are reserves of water sitting beneath the earth - waiting like oil to be drilled from their ancient tombs

what a beautiful nostalgia - the wide-brimmed farmer aloft his perpetually churning machine - no sign of drought or of hail or early frost here

The lie in that America is obvious to any reader of any book on any subject - even not farming - but the hope in the bread belt - the grains of it a sort of pebble across the water of culture - that is nice to look at to hold to the light and to see ourselves in

does that negate ourselves - make the want of truthiness to be invalid - it at least makes our claims pyrite though no less amazing in their reality

Poem-A-Day #306 : Alien

Alien

I want to go to Mars -

They are sending them in - are going to give them the keys to the place
experiments and the building of bubbles to live in

I dream of the bubble housing the smaller bubbles

The small growing things in the shield of man-made ecosystem

Think about the likes on those selfies -

God this is boring - is broken - there is a sense that a hole in the window would send everything in this world into space

It will freeze there

Lose itself in the not-black not-dark

Why don't we have a word for the color of space - the vacuum of our heads

I want to go to Mars -

Put on that suit - drift in the expanse for years - and come out the other side alone
where I would send cryptic emails and video messages

Where I would piss on the dead sand of that planet and make castles from the mud

Mainly -
I don't want to talk to people anymore

And that is the thing that resonates - the internet has left me not wanting to hear or be heard

I long for a rotary phone that only clicks and never receives but that's not true because Candy Crush -

Here is the buoy in the open wilds of imagination - it blinks seven times
is silent -
is even and calm - it only knows what fingers have touched it tell it to know

It beckons -

Poem-A-Day #301 : Cheapen

I was looking at old posts and came across THIS one from 2009. In it I talk about the unexplainable sadness that I get at poetry readings. Then I wrote a poem about Abraham Lincoln and how we are all reduced to the images we leave behind and eventually not even that.

I think I can explain my issue with readings better in 2016.

They render the work dead. A thing to recite. They are dull and boring and not much fun. They are staid and quiet and people nod their heads as readers render language into stupefying meaninglessness. They ivory tower. And most damning, they are not interesting.

Before you think I'm advocating for slams...I am not. They are hooting and hollering for buzzwords. They are waiting for the speaker to say a thing in that voice that indicates sass and skepticism. They are equally dead and equally ivory tower.

I think the reading as a form of delivery system for written things is not really worth much outside of a self-aggrandizing need for claps and book sales. That said. They are a thing that is done. Because how else do the words get into the faces? People don't read journals really. And few buy books unless they know the author or happen to find something randomly that they are into.

It's an issue. My solution is to do readings in non-traditional ways. At bars. Online. I don't think it fixes any of the issues with readings. But it means I don't have to go to a book store and stand at a mic and stare into nodding faces going 'mmm' at obnoxious points in the evening.


Cheapen

We break ourselves for what -

          There is a sense that we are ships docked together
     but what exactly are we afraid of

The drift into horizon -
A sound that is the collapse of self -

          We are paper rotting in the hold of night
     the only thing to be done is to take that and be it

Poem-A-Day #297 : That Woke

That Woke

I want to write something inflammatory
about how you are all about that
woke life

But I am tired

And uninterested in the discussion
not because the discussion shouldn't occur

But because the discussion will change nothing

Because fingers will point at the problem
will call out the problem
and will remain distant from it

Enough to not be bothered

Outside the hills fill with mist - they roll
like turf before a football game
they turn black and white

Here the vision of snow falling
the problem is covering in it

The static of it fuzzing silently

Let's both say something about our privilege
it will make us feel better

You can whip out your dick and compare it to mine
and then we can all feel satisfied that
we did all we could in the face of all this injustice

Poem-A-Day #292 : Refusal

Refusal

I hear that you don't want the flag to burn
that you believe we are divided
and our hands are hurting for lack of holding

Across the table I see your eyes
they are reflecting and moving like fish in a bowl
'darting' is a word that one would use to describe them

I must confess that I am tired of kumbaya
and have little interest in comforting anyone
this is perhaps a broken part of my soul

Your words bounce around the white space
they say things like 'politics is boring' and
'we must move beyond' and 'color isn't real'

I want to throw water in your face
slam your head into the wall until everything cracks
I want there to be blood when I am done

There is the sound of winter from the doorway
a sort of whisper death come to sit at the table

The flag will burn and your hands will grow cold
is what it seems to be saying

Again
this could be a fracture in myself

The idea that nothing is politics is a refusal
a turn from the world from ourselves

Politics is just a fancy word for feelings
which you seem deeply concerned with

Poem-A-Day #286 : Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation

Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation

The process is the thing

To see the car in the tree - the wood nails and glue

The idea of oil crisis - a sort of fracking
cracking the shell of the idea of a country

We want to see the yellow box on wheels as savior - we
want it to drive us to a future we cannot imagine


I pump the gas into the car that was bought as an afterthought

It is cold dark out and the station is bright

The truck across from me is empty - the door open - there is no one around

I hear the sound of the pump fulfilling itself


Saint Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael

Our lady of broken promises of lemons and car making

Industry science and technology - I want to talk about
the abandoned - the people who held their money out
and felt the rain coming


Light the candles - there is the repetition
                    desire need poverty and fear

It is a sort of cycle

And then the promise of freedom that cannot be

The mind convinces itself of its cagedness

And she stands up and points to the horizon - and the horizon responds
with light and with lines of dollars

A moment arises - it becomes prophetic - cool to the touch

The process is the thing
at the end of it there is no result - the hollow space
of new event and new horizon

Ad for the 1975 Dale

Poem-A-Day #281 : I'm A Little...You Know The Rest

I'm A Little...You Know The Rest

Of course I want to rage - kettle myself

I know how to whistle

The man at the corner was screaming repent into traffic
his mouth a dark hole into which pennies could drop and never fulfill a single wish

I thought about the unsteady hand that drew the sign
thick black scrawl against sunflower yellow
these are Charlie Brown lines I thought I wanted to yell out the window
          THESE ARE CHARLIE BROWN LINES

But I drove through the intersection - his wild hair in the wind

It's cold in Santa Fe today and this man is freezing to message

His temperature must be high

The problem with my raging - it evaporates quickly
becomes herbal tea

I never said this was going somewhere interesting
though you came on board and probably assumed it would destination

The reality is that I stare into the abyss of life and I don't even see an abyss

I see a thin cloth - loosely woven and unevenly made
full of holes and without pattern other than the continued overlaying of things

And I don't think raging helps thin cloth sustain

Steam does though - maybe - in directional ways

Iron-like ways

What I'm saying is that I don't want to rust but I don't want to shine either

Poem-A-Day #199 : Instructions for How to Engage with Art

Instructions for How to Engage with Art

The canvas wants you to touch it
to run your fingers against the raised strokes

Feel the ochre burnt and otherwise

It wants you to lose yourself in it
to become so encased in its universe
that you will not escape unchanged or at all

It wants to yellow wallpaper you

All of this is contingent on the artist
understanding the canvas well enough
to reveal the need within it

All of this requires you to step closer

To press your chest against the Mona Lisa and to search for her pulse
Take your clothes off and jump into The Water Lilly Pond

Be naked and covered

Don't Breathe

*
Water scares the shit out of me.

A day on a boat. Swimming in a lake. Spending time at a pool. These things do not calm me. To this day they call up a set of pre-made plans of escape.

The fear manifests in subtle ways.

Because I couldn't handle water in my face I insisted on baths until well into my teens.

The ocean is almost too much water to be afraid of so I can be near larger bodies of water without too much of a problem. I can even wade into water a bit. My height allows me to get fairly far out before I become buoyant. It isn't until then that the concern kicks in.

I'd be terrible on a cruise and have often thought about how I would deal with that situation. None of them are good solutions as they usually involve hiding from windows and fresh air.


*
I love horror movies.

The more full of tropes the better. I live for the moment when victims go up the stairs when they should go out the door. When they don't check to see that the villain is dead. I love trying to guess who will be the 'last girl' and who will die first.

Fede Alvarez
Photo by Gage Skidmore

It's a game. It's silly. It rarely scares me for real.

This evening I saw Don't Breathe. The movie was directed and written by Fede Alvarez. He also was responsible for the surprisingly good remake of Evil Dead from 2013

The premise is deceptively simple: three thieves enter a house owned by a blind vet to steal his money. The vet is not what he appears.

Where the movie enters into greatness is in how the premise reveals itself and plays out.

This is a brutal movie. It does not relent. The final act manages to up the ante of the film while subtly referencing horror tropes.

And it does this without being overly gruesome or falling into the pitfalls of torture porn that has ruined a lot of horror films in the years after the successes of the Saw series.


*
This circles around a question that I have about horror movies.

What scares us?

I'm sure that you have an example like mine. But these things are not what I'm actually interested in. Most horror movies don't actually depend on the things we are really afraid of. They play off making us jump and our natural inclination to be turned off by gore and death.

What I'm thinking about though is more what scares US. Collectively and culturally. What are WE afraid of.

Horror doesn't always feed off of cultural fears. But they inform it. The 80s were full of films featuring nameless, powerful, murderers coming after groups of beautiful youths. These fears can easily be tied to cultural fears of lawlessness and cold war fears of the 'other'.


*
Don't Breathe is set in Detroit. Most of the movie takes place in a lone house in an otherwise abandoned neighborhood.

It Follows was released in March of 2015 but made its way slowly into theaters. The story is, again, deceptively simple. A monster chases a young woman and wants to kill her. What sets it apart is that the monster is sexually transmitted. You have to fuck your way out of the death. This is a pretty good upending of the classic trope from 80s movies where the people who have sex usually die early in the movie.

The two movies both use traditional tropes to both utilize them and to break them. Though they do this while maintaining tension and refusing to make fun of the genre.

These are not the Scream movies. There is not an attempt to undermine or mine the genre.

Did you notice that both are set in Detroit? It's key to what I think scares America most in 2016. We are not afraid of terrorism, immigration, or any of that.

We are afraid of collapse.


*
Since the 1950s Detroit has experienced a 60% drop in population and even though the metro area of the city still has 4.3 million citizens Detroit has become the poster-child for what happens when an economy collapses in the 21st century.

This is what scares us.

The idea that a once-prosperous and important place could become unimportant and less wealthy goes against everything that American Capitalism promises. It proves us fallible. It says that the American Dream has cracks in it.

Setting these horror movies amid the collapse is a cunning representation of a new fear. The creature from It Follows and the vet from Don't Breathe also have faces. They are not the masked monsters from the 80s. They are people who look normal. They are us responding to collapse.

Interestingly, both movies also focus on white protagonists. And both manage to show a Detroit void of minorities. So it is not just collapse in general but specifically white collapse that is the source of fear. Don't Breathe renders this in literal terms with a brief appearance of a white supremacist. Both films also point out that the 'bad' parts of town are not where our protagonists live. They are not the white parts.

The danger is in the collapse. The breaking. And in the breaking the real danger is in what we do in response.

Do we retreat into our corners and stare at each other in fear. Lashing out when one comes close to us.

Or do we try to build something new.

Poem-A-Day #191 : The In-Itself

Have I mentioned that I'm reading a lot of Existential writings lately?


The In-Itself

The paper that once was a tree and before that a seed and before that another tree has been printed on with a language that becomes indistinguishable from air the more it is looked at

The words slide into lines and the lines match the lines that are signs of life in the wood that is now a table that the paper and words sit themselves upon

Signs of a life passed, the lines, they are signs of years and time that occurred that cannot occur again and they echo that sign and beep like Morse Code with the thinking of that time

Time is a construct and that construct has experienced the tree and the pre-tree and the words flowing backwards into ink and the ink seeping into the lines like the dead sap of life

The table is on a floor that has probably been stood upon before this table placed its legs here or before the words spilled over the edge of the table and stained the floor black

Black is not a color it is the absence of color of light it is refraction negated and the eye tricked into seeing nothing

The eye is also tricking it doesn't actually see it only reflects and that reflection is tainted by the bent of its lenses and the brain attached to those lenses

Lenses smooth and polis into an arc of seeing they break up the world into upside-down universes and then into right-side up ones they are the roots of the tree reaching into the sky

The sky isn't here there is a room around it and the table in its deadness is unable to breathe but the lungs the lines the ink itself is still thinking about it endlessly thinking about it

The thinking makes it real the pulsing ink makes it possible the floor makes it a pool to sink in to the paper itself tells the story of it and the words the language manages somehow to exist

Poem-A-Day #190 : Couplet #12

Couplet #12

Poetry -
            - the interminable "I"

Poem-A-Day #176 : Unfinished Thought On Malaise

Unfinished Thought On Malaise

                         and when I said that I just wanted to throw things to the flood
               and you broke into screaming fits and the skin on your forehead heated itself
     and your eyes reddened into sand

Sometimes we are bad people look I make choices look at all these choices I'm lousy with choices they cover the room in an installation of choices they impede progress and attempt to become life itself life of choices choices burning out themselves to become a star of imploding choices nuclear choices that will melt flesh

I don't expect you to understand with your ontology the way it is

-

     The impulse to undo everything is so strong

                    - put paint back in tubes - thread un-sweater - butterfly the goo-filled cocoon -

          Do not mistake this for destruction
though I understand that feeling this is more about what happens to things when they are un-ed

Do we forget them

When the city - which does not retreat it is not alive in that way - when the city cracks like a beetle under foot like exoskeletons in diatomaceous earth like the earth after rain -

                                        Do we forget that easily
if we want to I suppose we do - and when the thing falls and breaks on the pavement
we must either mourn or get the glue

-

Rust

Life lends itself to malaise

A sort of tentacled feeling
          suckers and all

     and all the things that might come with them
               the stinging ticks of a swarm of baby jellly fish wrapping on your legs
                         when I said it I meant it and I even intended to do it

Poem-A-Day #173 : On This Day

On This Day

.
          Alfred Russel Wallace published his theory of evolution today
                    alongside Darwin's first findings -

Who remembers Wallace -
               getting to be forgotten is perhaps unfair -

History is quick -
a fog rolling in that conceals
                                        then masks
                                                  then disintegrates -

.
In Edmond Oklahoma a man stormed a post office
and killed 14 of his co-workers
this is the birth of the phrase 'going postal'

A response to tragedy
humor within the darkness
and his name is probably not on the tip of your tongue

And that is probably alright

Getting to be forgotten is perhaps justice -

.
Khalid ibn al-Walid defeated Byzantium

          The most decisive victory in military history

Getting to be forgotten is perhaps terrible perhaps alright
          it is perhaps chance that this victory opened the world to Islam
                    through conquest

Is history ever not through conquest

.
                    There is a part of us that finds that information
               perhaps
                                        too obvious
                                        too hind-sight

          History is a weather pattern out across the ocean
          that never reaches a shore without consequences

Khalid ibn al-Walid Mosque
Homs, Syria

Poem-A-Day #171 : August

August

Summer has settled into that soft green that is not quite ready to be tired but is definitely at the peak of itself

The idea of troubling the water keeps coming that the water can be troubled to be a force for healing that healing is something that one must be forced to do

Summer is sadder than winter each plant is going going going like it has no recourse and they will never get to their finish before being wiped out by the end of it it's sinister that the light and water of it is just enabling destruction

This is a negative view of abundance and it is probably toxic and related to mood more than truth

Healing is the thing the growing season is not a time of healing it is too active and energy-consuming to be healing you need dormancy to heal

We need to hibernate ourselves here and now take some pill or be beaten about the head

The breeze this morning is moving the trees like curtains about to part and the effect is one of prelude one of soon to change one of this has been and will be again but first it must not be

Every poet is wrong about the seasons is backwards is blinded by the glint of sweat on a lip

Poem-A-Day #169 : Wood (Part 16 : The Curse of It)

I decided it was time to end this thing. It felt right. You can find Part One - HERE.


Wood (Part 16 : The Curse of It)

I didn't even ask your opinion on Christmas Tree farms : a 7-foot tree can take 12 years to grow : think of that space all those rows of Christmas just in a field somewhere waiting to be cut down and packaged : the seedlings start their lives in a greenhouse and they stay there for 4 years until they are allowed into the field to fully develop :

Christmas Trees are weird : in Europe they favor sparse trees with long branches and here in the US we like dense short-branched trees : we don't like the idea of sparseness : we want things so full to bursting that we can't even move : we are a tree farm that is over full and in need of thinning out : the US is a garden with too many plants it is abundant and beautiful and amazing and all of those things but it is also only going to be that way for a few weeks before it all collapses in root-bound thirst :

Is that what I planted back there : I mean we all want to be cultivated to grow as perfectly as we can with as few deviations as possible : as few broken limbs and overgrowth spots as we can muster : we want to leaf and leaf and leaf : we're all looking for resurrection after the fire :

I'm sorry I asked you here I feel like this has only circled a drain and not risen above : this wasn't the poetry that you were expecting what is this chatting nonsense about life cycles wasn't this about wood etc. : and you're probably right and I will put my hand on this one tree trunk and yet : and yet : I am deeply aware that beneath us the roots of this tree are intertwined with the roots of all of these other trees and that they seemingly are holding hands beneath the dirt : they are dependent and getting along :

But of course they aren't : they are engaged in a slow war they have centuries to do this : they are trying to choke each other to death :

Life is a slow war against not mattering : is that a dismal outlook a sort of nihilism : look outside of this : mattering isn't being famous or important in any real sense mattering is just doing yourself to the best and that sounds real self-help and is probably a good place to say let's go home we're tired and sun-stroked but fuck that I hate those kind of pat endings so...

What I want you to take with you : if anything : is the thing that I planted : and here it is pushing up from the floor of this space through the pine needles and wood shavings and larvae and debris of life : here let me get it up from the ground let me dig with my fingers it is good to touch the dirt once in awhile : did you bring a can or a bag or a jar it should be protected but it probably will not be and that's ok too : and this is also like a Hallmark card it's so much like a poem hovering over the image of a misty mountain : but it's also dangerous because it seems like love when it's actually like death : this thing you are holding I've put it in your hands I've given it to you and there are no take-backs : you have to think about it now and care for it and figure out what to do with it because I'm giving you nothing else to work with

Mango tree