An anvil crawls across the sky, of soft shape but steel gray, and I wonder when to expect the inbound tempest fray? When comes the lightening and thunder, the shaking window sills, the neck hairs standing upon end -- herald of lightening chills? Will it pass by rumbling distant or strike the local spire? Will it rain so hard that it puts out its own blazing fires?
I feel it coming, cyborg days -- locked into the machine. My program playing out the code of some new subroutine. To know it can all be dialed in, with such fine precision, the love and loathing that provide the root of all decision. And will I be a mindless drone on a robotic ride, seeing life like Doctor Jekyll while living as Mister Hyde?
If you can dance in wild, weird ways,
then you are truly free.
If you can’t, while you’re home alone,
you’re a bodily detainee.
A prisoner of life, itself —
a man who never was —
a tragic figure cut from plans
who will do, but never does.
I am a master of camouflage.
Blink and I’ll have vanished.
My stripy suit may make you think
that I have been banished
from the savanna to some jail,
but I’m still standing here.
Can you see me blending so well?
“Poof,” and I disappear.
A sight enflames my consciousness,
and the world blurs away.
And nothing vibrant or golden
can hold my mind in sway.
A simple beauty does the trick —
no gemstones are needed —
to ensure the cosmos beyond
lies wholly unheeded.
I never know what simple sight
will capture my focus —
perhaps, a cloud, or just a curve,
a creature, or a crocus.
Surely, I have misunderstood,
“Put my head where, you say?”
“But I have bones, don’t you know?”
“I wish I could obey.”
“Now, you say, my feet are too wide?”
“Really, what the heck!”
“You said put my head ‘tween my feet,
have you seen my frickin’ neck?”
“I wasn’t built to stand on my head!”
“What do you mean, ‘We’ll see?'”
“I’m not sure that you’re acquainted
with a thing called gravity.”
a hot spike of adrenaline
sluices into my blood
not a shot, a squirt, or a drip,
but an adamant flood
if you can find someone who gives
you that kind of feeling
without fearing a certain death
but, still, with mind reeling
Hold on!
From out a rocky mountainside
juts a sinewy limb.
Its existence appears brutal
and its future ever grim.
It hangs on by roots pinned in rock
dangling over the edge.
It’s splitting up that rocky crag
as if an iron wedge.
It feels the wind that whips around
that abrupt precipice,
and when the clouds envelope all,
it must feel perilous.
But never will that old dwarf tree
bemoan its cliffside fate.
Or curse the addition of a
hawk’s, or raven’s, weight.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 