Unsever & See

It was a bristlecone pine first told me
we have a trigger built into our cells
to disassemble, disolve into sponge
after so many years, same way the true
knowledge is kept severed from us,
leaving only that washerwoman screech
of a voice inside our heads, scared,
unsure, distrusting, vain, talking a road
scribbled into the Utah desert with a sign,
“10,000 miles to the next stop for gas.”
A hoodoo joined in, laughing at our sense
of time, how we got it backwards, unaware
the future fairly demands the best from us,
but we resist. Get a poet in a seance mood,
and he’ll tell you how all of our words fail,
as if we invented only tools to stab
ourselves or scrape every living thing
clean off the Earth’s surface in a daze
of the most dangerous drugs mistakenly
in our veins just because love is is is
so temporal, and we get so angry.
Listen to a poet out of his mind, and do
what he says to see where you are now.
Yep, that Bryce hike destroyed a man
who grew up wanting to be a cowboy,
have all the promised addictions, and live
as if total control was never in doubt.