Art has changed my luck:
my road does me favors every now and then,
offers billows of smoke, but tempers its wrath.
But I still have no taste for an unseasoned remedy.
3 weeks ago, on a walk into the park,
I came across a bird long dead
stretched on the gridded concrete,
cleanly decaying, no trail of ants
or roil of maggots, purified by the cold.
I knelt there for awhile, I remembered
how my hand looks like how my father’s hand
used to look.
This is the bulbous fruit we are offered
to taste and see.
I will never understand the way
the ground is always thirsty, even as the rain
scrapes across it, carries it away.
Anyone can feel the philosophy
in the contours, in the smoothness
of a hammer’s grip, in its intentions.
Its appetites are no mystery.
I don’t think I understand this one… Something about how we can deceive ourselves into thinking the world is nice and pleasant, but in fact the nature of it is toward destruction and wrath?
Well I mean, if if it was simple enough to be laid out all plainly, I wouldn’t have written a poem.
It isn’t really about deception, it’s more about the reality that we are, in some sense, not designed to die, but die we do, every last one of us. Is that a sufficient entrance into the poem?