i. hiking at dusk
boulder county open space
twelve woozing ounces,
bottlenecked into a near
phallus of contradiction,
maybe, six times, or seven of them
depleted, to be hidden
in the liver's ditch,
like roadside bombs-
emptied masses of glass
just begging to burst.
we do things,
crazy, uncondonable,
crappy things,
to hurt ourselves
in the relentless pursuit of pleasure,
escape held up high, like
it was the best and only measure;
we can't pledge to heal the world
while drowning in crosstown traffic,
or when doing something classic
just to be important in their news
for once, perhaps,
cuz that would mean, any scraps
of sanity unwraps, and shoots
at all the wrong targets- fretful folk,
who won't see through their masks;
because what the last goddess wanted,
the one with pink and purple hair,
and spikes, that stick up like fake rebel stalagmites,
what the last goddess wanted
was one of my amber ales, as my feet dangled
over the precipice of gregory canyon,
free to be seen, as two booted pendulums,
that spectral, sun ripened hawks
could slowdance under.
ii. gardening at dawn
aurora
this stolid bloom, that still blooms:
always middle-fingering doom,
this stubbornly verdant sentinel of a stalk,
something that wants to grow bigger,
wants to be left alone, in a droughtful strip
of inconstant soil fertility.
later, upon the first whimper of may,
my oddly shaped garden
begins to take definite shape, out here
in the rectal discharge
of striptease suburbia,
where what the last goddess wanted
was to never pretend
that any of this could work, or should,
that there could be something righteous
about dancing selfishly
upon a sinking stage
of concrete, lead, and brick,
unfracked petrochemistry sinkholes
and the final remnants of healthy seeds
buried in pits, ten feet thick.
iii. meditating at noon
golden
when will we actually be
the deities whom that goddess wanted?
when she woke up one day,
drank some zapatista coffee
from a postcard of chiapas,
and wrote in the sky that
stocks and bonds are really just
hustler handcuffs and
swindler straitjackets,
yes, let's truly try to mend
this brutality planned,
miseria sin fin,
from patagonia to greenland,
dos poles exploited
for all that people and nature can give,
until there is nothing left, and
we cannot pretend to forgive
those who grow gordo
on our lack of opportunity,
notportunity prescribed
by a general sense of
commercial crudity.
what if, what the last goddess wanted,
as she sat exposed,
withholding wrath,
was nothing more
than a surprise joke,
and a hearty laugh?
