ECOLOGY

Name it Axe or Prey or Jim but don't leave it sitting perch as though ready to plunge the line runs the length of three blades slicked with the finest wax but in that strung cup vibrations quake the image into pixels shielded from the inside recognizing its own seed in the haze-built lead dome meltdown leak of the poisonous under and everyone wants a carbiner and ripped calves like a porcelain god what have you to offer you pooler of your own fat coals brewing hearth until shot through with infection popping out the maypole the mulberry bush the circular push and pull the hooks buried in the pectoral the line cleaning between ribs like floss the hum of taut line three jays landing through your efforts three more saved

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BASIDIOCARP

Among the witnesses sprung up who have no tongues only this mycelium and caps with coins for mouths like eyes sprouting across your chest you cut out tending with fists of water and shit these Hyphae you know could blanch the networks with Definition One hand down your throat the other hailing modes of go-the-trail broken wetblack with showers you predicted you right person [you jobbed mute]

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"Ecology": This poem arose from the incredibly unpleasant image of a taut line pulled between two ribs, ala dental floss, like a quest to clean one's irradiated, hot-with-infection, fat-filled innards. More images came, each more painful to visualize, then the contrasting image of the maypole and mulberry bush, the unsung happy song.

I'm envious of those good souls who truly work to save the environment, and I'm very hard on myself because I'm a half-hearted environmentalist. I suppose this poem is poking fun, in a very nasty way, at my own moral shortcomings. Jays, I presume, are not endangered.

"Basidiocarp": We're all mushrooms, damn it! This is really an expression of my ontological world view. I like the idea of being subterraneously connected rather than linked transcendentally, somewhere in the Cosmos. We are such violent tenders of our shared garden, what with our lack of sight, so triumphant in our connectedness we must constantly stifle our own self-awareness.