Friday, December 30, 2011

Beggars Mites- a work in progress 10-8-11- the dictionary phase

Your words are like crumbs
on my path.
Scraps, scattered,
to designate, mark, blaze
a journey, a passage-
home.

Hanseled to the earth,
Greteled to a tree;
these crumbs are a child's
way of remembering,
a last ditch of an affect.
("an expressed or observed emotional response")

I gobble them hungrily,
like the black-capped chickadee
of mixed forest
(decidious/coniferous)
the present
or
prairie,
past.
darting, pivoting, hovering,
hanging upside down to feed:
a balencing act
of wild chickery, Queen Anne's lace, and beggar's lice
and body weight.
Is it the weight or the wind
that bows my support,
my foundation?

II.

My days, nights
are consumed
with my caches of your words
I've stored in dead bark,
leaves, and clusters of connifer needles-
3G data plan-
till my 28 day memory fades.
The words putrify in morning light on that 29th day...
like manna, words were never meant to be hoarded-
kept prisoner in the brain...
cankers...
I count the words on my fingers-
I tick them off.
Flicking my fingers in a chant-
a rhythum...
It is not enough.

III.

Instead I would be the jay,
stellar,
raucous,
cackling, cawing,
flaunting my presence
in the boughs of pine.
Flashing blue
in the tangle
of a manzanita maze.
(a wall not unlike Sleeping Beauty's thorny barrier-
but I'm no sleeping beauty and you are not a prince...)

My life in fairy tales
is grim.
What looks to be is not.

Stealing kibbles of dogfood
instead of oily black sunflower seeds...
A sentinel: in a watch-
tower of mammath sugar pine.
I dip, carry, hide.
Loud in my protest
at your entrance,
disturbing my feeding,
my growing,
my changing.

IV. Geier

I would be King of the Sky,
not groveling groundward,
seduously scurrying,
mindlessly amassing
the soupcan you've strewn upon my path.

My olfactory lobe pierces the litter
of the forest floor.
I reign in confidence,
kettling skyward on thermals.

I know what I want:
not crumbs,
or beggars mites.
My life is not fairy tales,
nor grim.
What looks to be is not,
and crumbs on forest floors
leave me hungry.

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