trees
i stand silent amid the trees
admiring their poly-rhythms
and their long lived beauty
shaped like slow lightning reaching from the earth
are the boughs of life's embrace of being
yet in their complexity whose communion is hid
from our simple world of words
they are as surely at war
as they flood the canopy of smaller trees
with their umbral shadows and suffocate
all that challenge that tall crowned majesty
indeed peaceful is just an over-current
and the roots of the world are scavenged
with the changing challenges of turmoil
in a turmoil of leaf and bract
within their cross patterns swaying
is a vision of my skeleton
with its crown of dust and worms and white-bone
pick and clean by the scavenge of the wild world
its revenge on intellect and beauty
reflecting the corruption that lies somewhere centric
within our liquid bodies
vapourised into new life
and new angst and new struggle
why doesn't it beg
where is the world of concord for all things
where is the promise of a paradise
for we dark beings of earth
here in an atom or in the farthest reaches
of the distant heavens
a journey without compromise somewhere
embedded in the encrypted subtleties of the journey
strange scales against the instruments of discord
i am ambivalent
for i want and yet i don't want
i know that it will bring destruction
but the path set cannot be altered
for you have all wished it so
and i am your hostage
your deep collective psyche
the agent of my fortune