In the Wee Hour of Life

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My father-in-law,

Lucidity, blinking and broken

Declares his life a night,

a forgotten dimension.

So fast,  where

Did it go?

He is still outside

The forest of human

Travel

Following the script

Of human hand

That began in sand and

Grit

 A hand that sent him to war

To love

To fatherhood

To the hearts of those

Who would wash his sluggish body

Wrinkled, tissue depleted

Immobilized by an angry destiny

And landscapes of untold design

And still he wonders why –

The three letter

Through the looking-glass question

Whose answer awaits in the forest

Where the path – trodden slight –

Will call – he is moving there

To that forest where flowering

Dogwood bloom in wait

For his steps light and inoffensive

Like he

A child in this fractal world

Enfolding unto himself the same

As we’ve always known

Even as he is resorbed

By nature – that path

He will trod, swaddled in linen

Looking ahead in painless

Expectation

FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN

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You,

who have taken God from her forest

taken her and clothed

her in items of your choosing

Jewels and houses she would eschew.

Put a gun in her hand put her sons

in foreign lands – all

In the name of her father.

You, who have twisted her words

to create the leviathan called

modern culture.

You, who walk the street undercover of pinstripes and attaché and

a business card for proof, and privilege.

You, who cannot judge the passing smell oozing

(a fragrance?) from the carcass of your dying civilization

Yet you judge.

 Fear.

Please do.

 For someone has sallied the rope

Spanning  the crevasse between man and the super man.

Someone knows that side of the swampy abyss and

It’s folly:

You, making it yours with every sweep of arm and voice.

You, who  strive to be occupied with life’s banquet

As you jockey for position and invent

for convenience

determining closeness to your God.

Surprise! When the female of the species,

(Fear this)

with her patterned wings, rises from the swamp and

with nothing more than her sense organs

 drives you back to the craggy edges of your success.

It is she (not you) who will enact the inevitable:

extinction through natural selection.

She worries not.

Moving from host to host she will

ensure that you and your super-kindred,

in attending this banquet,

will surely

sit and starve.

Love for the Forecaster

clouds behind the trees

Of weather searching for the signature

correcting for the miasma

of the crooked wind season

folding in on time

The supreme seer

picking apart the covenant

between nature and that

hallowed sometimes

hollow heart of hope

Warmth is king

the predictor wears the crown

to the end of the world

of cold

Today,

like a preacher

taking God

From the forests

setting her up

in a house of his own

The diviner daring

audacity to

recapture imagination

with warm words

Scattering tepid halos

upon the heads of

Farmers

Flowers

Lovers  and

The remianing

Unanointed: