(Published on the Humans of the World blog, winning first prize in its 2022 Summer Poetry Challenge.)

Cassandra Adjacent

It’s overtime. And we’ve replaced
presence with performance.
We captured an image
to withdraw intention. We rattle cagey syntax
to lose the clues and count cold likes.
The likes pile up and the subtle body relaxes.                       
 
I warn of these attacks with but a sleepy muse.
Late-stage capitalism limits limbs and sinews.
Bloodshot eyes choose the garden’s rot.
Three particles from stars already dead
convene the most marketable headshots.
It hurts to stand in the way.
 
I guess I am more a crack on the spectrum
than a Cassandra.        Look at where trees limn
the heavens.                For fuck sake,
look at how seed surrenders to the larger life.
For fuck sake,             allow me to remember how
the world was              before poison chilled
with the needle of numbers and accountable grace.
Before original blessings in the glass gardens
pulled the rhizome prank
to monetize the dark matters at the root. 
There, when the lucid apple broke rank to place
the infinite memory in finite space.
 
Let’s say it’s God, then, in your face.
(Free me from the algorithms’ virtual absolutes.)
This practice is to knock three times on the Tree of Life
to count on the anima of what’s left. 
Ah, the metrics of codes and clarion calls!
I yearn for you to hear all of me dispute
the standard model
as it invents the space and time it also denies.
(Thrice denied before the dawn of stones). 
A new Tree of Last Chances and ciphers and ones won’t grow
from this rare earth nested in metals’ secret.
The danger is more finite with every dawn,
it’s time to move on.
The word changes its holy profile to ghost you. 
You won’t recognize anyone.
Turn off. Turn off. Turn off oh bruised body.
Repeat this 20 minutes every day. You won’t be left out.

 (Published in the August, 2022 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press).

Mock Orange

We wait in the greenest bowers 

made from borrowed water with no need to return the favors

from a world where everything changes every hour. 

The world here where Santana winds 

make mud dust, and turn the day inside out. 

             We wait for nothing. 

             Nothing is in our blood. 

In a den of thieves and strangers with no strings, 

the cosmetic replaces the cosmic, with eternity 

             as Plan B. 

 Pick up the replacements fallen from the orange sky. 

Smoke too falls out of the blue on ragged ranges and shores 

and on the valley of placeholders; instead of rain 

blossoms drop the ball. A net appears when the game 

is done. The numbing vegetation of theme and variation 

is borrowed too. A culture of sly flourishing only hungers for more 

We were tired at birth, nothing but temples, tabernacles, 

tents and gymnasiums in the transplanted eucalyptus. 

Nothing but a sketch of progress, a hint of jasmine 

in wounded summers and rosemary in the perfect autumns 

of the land with no seasons. Tired in the middle 

of what was unplanned. The body exhausted 

the-days-the-Lord-hath-made, and ran up a bill. 

No debt was recorded. No root needed the doubt 

rejoicing for air at the surface, 

in beauty immune from scarcity, 

immune from drought, 

from sleeping on the beach and under the stars. 

Tired hands only, only from too much play, a mission 

to salute the reality of no history. 

             They brought the relief 

of no history, of bones stripped and ready for lies. 

The fabulous respite of no narrative but the waves 

crashing just the way they did for the Chumash 

and will, when, choked with plastic molecules 

they roll on the empty beach when our wait is done. 

Of bones dressed to kill. We came to be killed. 

We took the drugs to make the kill count. 

And now, waiting for the score, we breathe deeply 

as the scent of oranges spends itself on our skin. 

The night opens the flower to its borrowed conclusions. 

To the sweetest imitation of fruit and its ripening. 

 The line between paradise and rot was never clear. 

We took the drugs to hide our uncertainty 

and hoped the line crossed 

was because the path of least resistance 

took us home. 

            Where we would never tire of beauty again.