the woods behind the house extends a sustained but curious sense of authority as if their push against the sky was preordained which is not true/ but rather/ we are all creatures of evolution/ we were not always this/ but arrived walking out of oceans (heroically) long since disappeared/ more likely flopping about on a beach/ probably a fish/ today, we are nothing more than a gnawing grief which recognizes we shit where we eat and there is nothing to be done/

we, too, are done/ a brief arc of a comet’s tail/ beyond remedy/ immitigable/ difficult to educate and probably not worth the time or the argument that there’s still a chance we might save it all/ optimism’s hearts-and-flowers in caricature a hope springs forward as the eternal unlicked cub, but we have done the planet in/ a little world of troubled seas, the shit has overflowed, and the planet is a lunatic’s asylum that has slipped the search/

i sit among the trees behind my house, the wind another eunuch, the moving of the trees as if in apprehension/  the house in the immediate distance sulks with boys and their music and their pounding and that laughter, that Elysium brawn of dust as manifest as a shifting cloud/