The Sense Can Boast

The count is lost.
That’s how it goes
With tongues
That shift each day,

Like this one, loose
In our wide mouths.
We’re all shades now
Who speak its shapes.

The sense can boast
A while, at least,
But it grows numbed,
And then the tongues,

Words young and old.
The day will come
When sense is all
And all are dumb.

One Slash F

That would be our brand
If we ranched, if words
Had cows. One Slash F
Brand, scarred on the hide.
You’d know cows were ours.

Through our flat green fields
And up our steep slopes
Of brush cows would browse.
The hum of the tires
Of trucks down the road,

The rare shrieks of trains
With full loads of freight
Would not faze our cows
Plumped on grass and cud.
Life eats. It goes on.

We’d work 1/f
In steel on our gates.
You’d know, back of those,
That words owned the rest
Of what you saw fenced.

We’d tune to the land
As ranch hands. We’d work
Dusk to dusk. Birds sleep
More than us. You rest,
We’d say. We’ve got this.

Fire or Sleep

Lines jig up peaks and down troughs,
Like fires seen on slopes at night.

It’s just your mind, just your thoughts
Lost in all that heat and smoke

As you burn your way through life.
White noise from the clouds jags down

And up you go, line by line.
Too much fuel and too much heat,

Then too much fire and you sleep.
Close to spring, on damp grey dawns,

It all looks like one black scrub
Shawl tossed on the hills. Life snores

In the low tones of bored wind
That picks through the dead, downed woods.

You’ll be back. Fuel and fire core
All worlds. It’s their dance, not yours.