pelicans gather
where jade hills smother
storm cloud reminiscence
wine spilled and
wine spilled and….

barefoot and running
they made words for us
but let’s start singing
made up songs
“ you skipped and spattered
said yes and muttered
they’ll always be something
in the bottle humming,”
wind on the water makes waves
but moon rhythms and boulders
and gulf streams–
garbage saves!

pelicans gather
where jade hills smother
storm cloud reminiscence
wine spilled and
the creek gushed o’er the walls
hair wet you held hands
and ducked until the cops light
stopped shining
“sshhh” let’s make this place our own.
Let’s make this place our own.

pelicans gather
where jade hills smother
storm cloud reminiscence
wine spilled and
wine spilled and….

In the inner power struggle
the secret always seems to be the only way to
make any sense of not saying
not being able to placate
or to communicate
or to gain desires.

What I say never matters.
Only my actions matter.
I have an astounding ability in
intersections and beddings.
But beyond the bed,
my active energy slows to passive.
I’ve figured out that I can ask
I can suggest
I can explain
but it never seems to make a difference.
Sometime I hide in these written words
because the spoken never
matter.

It all seemed to start in 5th grade.
Demeter chasing Persephone
across the classroom in a rolling chair.
Like herding cats, 5th graders don’t listen to 5th graders.
Pretended practicing until I was blue in the face
spitting grass of the back baseball field.
You Hades. You the Pegasus dragging the closest thing we had to a chariot.
It was a pale attempt at directing a play
by someone whose words often didn’t matter.

But still, I think these lessons began even earlier.
Usually all situations can be traced back to the past
into history, through millennia.
Mine was a house of punishment and control.
Love was there too, but behavior and thoughts carefully sculpted
made an ordered forest without questions.
Certainly, there, I learned to hide from punishment.
My words didn’t matter because there was only one word.
The funny thing is that Logos doesn’t even mean word.
It refers to the divine knowledge and animation of the universe.
Logos is not limiting. But somehow I was limited.
Their logos made my word a kowtowed slave.
The word “no” became meaningless. Only yes and yes sir
and yes Jesus and yes I’ll do it, yes I understand, yes I agree
yes yes yes.
And yet they wondered why I had such a hard time saying no to “sin” when
I learned the evil of no from the end of a pink yard stick.

So there we go, this is why my words don’t matter unless I’m saying yes.
Yes is the only thing I know how to do.
Anything less than yes gets twisted back in scowls
the sting of punishment or a simple back turned.
What’s more, I don’t know how to deal with no.
I can only deal with yes. Disgrace becomes
an uncleanable mess of turpentine on my floor so yes,
yes becomes my friend. And no,
no becomes the whispered passings of
a fly before swatting.

dark carcass cum orifice

where I clasped

now unoccupied

how I relished

now desolate

the once permanent

now interim

our symphonic interlude of

diversion, collaboration, association

climaxed and finished

by the sacred conductor

with a flourish calamitous enough

to bring our little eden

to an unwelcome end.

Whereto now?

Move on. Bury. Beyond.

In my Valhalla we will eat together again

and after the feast we’ll lay down,

sleep will come easily this time.

Are you a peasant too?
Pride designed per passion–
each pliant as a percentage,
towards the unexplored but painstaking
mapped commitments of production
and dissipation. Mother. Hides her goose.

Joel Salatin is basically a grass farmer. Droughts don’t bother him. He doesn’t sweat gas prices. His cows fertilize and harvest his product for him. In return he gets fresh and healthy milk and meat full of necessary essential fatty acids. His chickens roam in portable pens around the fields after the cows, spreading the cows’ manure and eating bugs and grass. No antibiotics needed. Minimum feed necessary. Happy and bad-bacteria free animals!

Perhaps it’s the cynic in me, but I can understand Salatin much better than I can the final conclusion of Food, Inc. Somehow, after seeing the crowds of White House officials, Supreme Court judges, and Senators who had first worked for Monsanto or Smithfield, I’m supposed to feel that calling your local Congressmen to pass Kevin’s Law is somehow going to make the system better. Sure, the government should be able to shut down meat packing plants with consistent occurrences of E.coli and other bad bacterias. But with the current marriage between Corporations and Government I can’t help but think that if any law like this passed, it would not do what it originally set out to do. Perhaps it would lead to shutting down smaller plants and farms in lieu of the big guys creating super strains of E.coli.

I prefer Food, Inc.’s other message. That, at least currently, we all have the power to educate ourselves and make our own food choices, not based on what’s cheaper pricewise but cheaper in the long run. I’d rather eat less food and less meat to ensure that I’m supporting systems based on renewal and cooperation instead of waste and drain. The current system is clearly not cheaper. It costs in government subsidies and depends on cheap prices for inputs with very little output. In a permaculture system, like on Salatin’s farm, there are more outputs than inputs. At a farm in contract with one of the 4 large food conglomerates, the inputs exceed the outputs. It’s just that oil prices are low and government subsidies help keep production costs low so that we can’t tell what the real cost of the inputs are.

Overall, it’s no wonder that happy animals, eating what nature intended them to eat, make much healthier food. We can stop the diabetes epidemic right now simply by changing what we eat. Thank you Food, Inc. for making me feel hopeful rather than depressed.

living in this universal crowd
of masked faces
where to touch one is tantamount
to sacrilege, violating
caste purity–
how could I pick your face
from the anonymous mass
contravening this unspoken
border between each individual country.

Such craving throngs to crescendo,
the wrangle between autonomy and harmony,
hands wanting to cross boundaries
minorities within perimeters
pan-identity beyond frontiers
and the sanctity of the solitary.
You reach across your wall
to my foreign hand
on a cold night
in lieu of darkness
passports no longer needed.

shit splatter pathway,

coming from what?

Then she flies up,

head disappearing up metallic tube

I see something in her mouth.

Of she goes,

my head cocks curiously

is something inside,

was she getting food?

That’s when he appears,

suddenly emerging,

the flap wags after him.

‘What a home,’ I think,

imagining the warm dark interior

safe from predators

high up from the ground.

‘The fan must be broken,’ you say,

former wind tunnel turned

starling bungalow.

Homes are piled together here.

Aviary and human.

We eat, we forage.