Sometimes serious

when a tree is struck by lightning electricity will pass from its tip to toe, in the moist vessels under its bark split its bark outwards in one loud crack burn that which was wet in the rings inside the contour topography of its years. when a tree is struck by lightning a purple-white flash will find ground through its roots kill it immediately a tree, whole within unstable seconds but it will take years for the decay to show for a tree to become rotten wood. when a tree is struck by lightning a temperature five times hotter than the sun shall shock it; this duration will be nothing, in its large life but enough amperes to change it from an object of biology to an object of physics. green leaves, will still live after the thunderstorms the flash fires the electrocution, and the communication from a cloud; for a while. things are not really understood until the right metaphors arrive. i have thought of many: driftwood in a river, snowflake

we are left, out cold without our very own lies that protected us

whether your heart breaks slowly, or in one shot no hustle whether it decomposes, with fungus and decays like dead muscle or unravels like a sweater smelling of mothballs or lives for another 600 years gradually blurring like stone carvings or quietly explodes, like a nebulous supernova or loses its flavor, like a bulb of jasmine tea or rusts like what once was your house key or dissolves like salt in the sea  or flies away like an adolescent bird or reduces sacrificially, like sandalwood or melts in a furnace or rots in a landfill or is recycled in a large system of municipal and diplomatic negotiations with countries, shipping companies, and profits, in order to bring it back somehow in another form so that it can continue living and beating perhaps as itself or as any other matter, treated with chemicals and talk to make it work within a narrow range in the spectrum of mental states, the walls of this range closing tightly around

i want to show you how tiny flecks of snow  that have now started to land, very slowly,   melt very fast - tell you what i learnt about the three types of snowflakes.  the ranges of impermanence the types of melt, in northern winters. the frost on white-bearded autumn leaves, that you told me were all  dead explicitly  in your language how knuckles get chafed  by just being exposed in this temperature i want to tell you where i’ve been and what was exciting and who i’ve met not in a formalized communicative transaction but in pedestrian and boring passing speech  where the importance of  each nugget of communication is not like blooming flowers but indifferent, and stable like grass i want to tell you the lines that  gave me pause, and read them to you many times over and over again as if just your hearing them, would make them doubly meaningful i want to detail the contours of your life that i only know against the ligh

you see my heart is overheated now. in this reclamation island on this crude coastal sand drying straw that was grass - there is now unbearable heat no matter how many dips i take into the salty ocean all that springs up is ring-tabs of beer cans poly bags worn pieces of glass and other light garbage of everyday but no relief. in guarding this geography the habitants of this mind forget to want to eat and sleep to have desire. i have become an impatient bait for the politicians of the psyche who fish with a hook and feed for proof i am that soapbox you can use to remind yourself and your friends to not be miserable despite having everything like me ______ an everyday search for enthusiasm feels like an entire country has run out of news stories and the papers print blank sheets to circulate with the tea and a view of the morning the boulevards of pink sakura orange gulmohur canopies fuschia bougainvillea rain that is a solid object in air a

what is this new low that the self has gracefully reached at where adjusting has paid the price that used to be paid by holding tightly on to one another when has this unbridled restlessness of the spirit  like a dark unwieldy northern winter entered which manifestations of assurance will this heart forever miss forever tie-dying itself a new shade of prussian blue as brittle as lapis but as deep.

Use a new language like a spice. migration for that exact job is the spice trade of today, and we the merchants of this new coarse pepper to flavor our dissatisfaction that we have simmered slowly for years into a soup. Wear a new language like a raincoat only in its cover, keep a sense of identity, using it both as a shield as well as an excuse to mix with the water. Stain your lips with a new language in the color of a local material using beetles and red ochre vermillion and lead and pretend to carry shades of geography and ecology. Bear a new language like a corpse of a loved one taken to their grave. Understood partially claimed hesitantly, appropriated unfairly, on its grave its web of reference. Tremble as you walk under this weight. Wash a new language like dirt from your hands. You played in the soil all day making clay pots and now you are ready to soak another place in like a shallow sponge that crumbles away as it ages.

You can’t test for it in the blood –  looking for psychotic spores,  like tiny black roses –  or feel the part of the brain that is broken with the flat of your hand,  like a shattered collarbone or thumb. nor in an x-ray  Nor do you find a type - B Rh+,  x an extent of deficiency of vitamin G,  a supplement that you can eat to be normal again like the other people. If sadness was fever, and you could say for sure that anything above 38 degrees was bad if you could specify how many units of suicidal thoughts were indicative and which hydroxide would act on an unkind thought, and an erratic action. If only the cause was an extra skein you had underneath your skin and all you needed was an operation and not balance if all you needed was to find that part that made you this way.