

For Nature
You do not miss the Odes and Sonnets
romancing your Spring
as though poems could woo you
like pretty girls with Valentines
To pass the fitful millennia of a day
you grind mountains and
inhale decay, blow life.
You stretch: an ice age melts.
You shift in your seat; the world opens like breaking bread.
You fart ash on Pompeii, cough plague, sneeze butterflies
and care not in the least if we sneer at
your pretentious sunsets, your passé daffodils,
roll our eyes at corny nightingale cries.
You are no subject for this time. We’ve post-post-modernised.
Impassive we slice poems with broken shards from the mirror of life
and serve up cold the detritus of yesterdays events:
sagging beds
cigarettes
styrofoam cups
chewing gum
commercials bleating our inadequacies late at night.
You are not serious enough.
A rose may sugar the rhymes of greeting cards
but for a poem we narrow our eyes
and squint with metaphors at who we think we are
describe the poignant loss of stained sheets
to avert the thought that like cattle we rut,
articulate paradigms of thought
as though we don’t fence our houses like territorial piss,
dab at our nests, eat, sleep, shit.
We write poems for Language itself-
our manifold howl against death
and die
swallowed into your earth
which you will digest, excrete
and make bloom.