Only Nature

Some say, in quiet, nature hums.
It's their excuse to play their drums.
Deep in the throes of tie-die dreams
They talk of nature's harmony.

The only nature I know is
A place no hippie's fit to live,
A place that's red in tooth and claw
'Neath anarchy of Darwin's law,
A place of stingers, spikes and thorns,
Where all from man to ant make war.

Unconsidered Words

Nothing tastes more disgusting

Than my own unconsidered words,

Reductive, repugnant, ridiculous,

Regretted the second before they left me.

Nothing tastes more delicious

Than my own unconsidered words,

Unregretted, unrepentant, unrestrained,

Unchained in pursuing my own passion.

They're only words, after all, only symbols

Which lose strength as they ripple.

The Alchemical Properties of a Seating Chart

In the wrong hands, a seating chart is the philosopher's stone,

Capable of turning an actor, an athlete, an artist,

A future father of three distinct daughters

Into “the one who sits in the middle of the third row.”

Struggling Writers

I have made my peace with subjects and predicates,

With message and purpose and audience,

With phrases and clauses and serial commas.

What I'm fighting is the pejorative use of the term "struggling writer."

All writing is grappling with a language; no writer will ever pin it down.

The only truly failing writer is the one who stops struggling.

Bits

If a bit falls in the cloud

Before it gets any pageviews

Does it make a sound,

and if it had two million

Two months ago, did it?

Time is a mystery

Wrapped inside a gordian knot

Wrapped inside the human brain,

But the internet's a funhouse,

and our memory is a mirror.

Facebook is now, on its way to then.

Youtube is always, and never.

Half and Half

I've come to a sort of rough comfort with space

'Tween proverbial rocks and their partner, hard place.

Between need to and want to I've left some regrets,

But neither is that choice as bad as it gets.

Between want to and want to, I'm no more than half right,

and the what's wrong can never be less than half my fault.

The Consumer

I have lived decades on a steady diet of American Culture.

I have chewed on it for long hours and drunk it down in great gulps.

It is in the very air I'm breathing; immersed even now, I absorb it by osmosis,

and because I cannot push it out, I am heavily impacted.

After all, American culture is not high in fiber.