Don’t tell me stories about screaming trees.
I’ve heard them in the forest after dark.

Strange boats landed on the shore from vast seas,
carrying saws to make a proper park
of old growth lands that lay beyond the known
and sweep up the sun-dappled leaf litter,
sowing where they’d reaped & reaping what they’d sown,
silencing the chitter of bird and critter.

Rearranging, like bedroom furnishings,
the space of nature’s grand, endless chaos.
Building fences, trapping, and clipping wings.
They spay and spray and pray, and scrape the moss.

The boats, long since rotted, landed near here
between that Taco Bell and the concrete pier.