Season 22

It is so profound how I don't think about it anymore.

With nature on its way out I packed melancholy

into an airtight jar and put it on the shelf beside the jar

marked philosophy—jars full of rhyme and em dashes.

I Scribbled several examples on scraps of paper

with all the new sentences beginning with a capital letter,

then I jump into the ocean without a worry.

I am not afraid my feet will touch the seaweed;

it's not there anymore, neither are the sharks, whales,

dolphins or the jellies. There are no lions lurking

in the woods —there are no woods.

At my age you just want to sit around chewing

willow bark with what teeth you have left.

At one time it was lace, cotton candy,

and chewing the fat. It's still the fat only the fat

is missing its core. I leave the lights off,

I will not be able to turn them off when I leave.

Maybe something will crawl out of the ocean

like it did millions of years ago,

or maybe a million years from now.

Something half-fish and half-mammal

will find those jars and write the first poem,

before anyone else can write the first wrong

fan the first flame.