Nobody Knows

Nobody knows
At night my eyes shoot fire;
Padded cats slink skeptic
Past this frenzy

Fingers fly
On phantom’s keys
Hammer out the fizz
Of synapse, lung and spine
Cathedrals rise

Just a cankered worm
Is all they see
Twisting in the mound

But I am more

Not a resource, not this name
Not a shirt and not a brain

Something more

Can’t you see it?
Every body
Is an eye

Bobbing on antennae
Thousand strong and
Alien and very, very old

Or greener —
Tips of branches
Stirring in the gale
Of eons’ storm

Something more

Until
All eyes shoot fire, thirsting
For ignition on
This humble globe

But they don’t know

I show up smiling
Shaven face, disguised
In shoes

A tuft of fur:
The cats’ affection
Winking at my secret
From below

Giving Up the Green

Black leaf against the sky
Tracing arcs of abandon

No one left to see it now
No one left to wonder
Why it gave up
The green

On a hot breeze blowing
Past the husks of silos
Where the brambles whistle
Over thistle and forlorn

Little leaf is sailing
Through the broken grin
Of cities sunk in shadow
Full of cars that don’t pollute

Almost stuck in the great
Brown-green river
Oozing through empty cables
Once a bridge a mile long

It is firmly caught
In a forest of fur
Pylons like the stuff
That used to grow on cheese

The leaf is absorbed by the fungus
Staring at the sky.
And where is the mind to eulogize
This stupid leaf, vestige
Of a world gone by?

The mind is somewhere
Cause Mind can never die
But it isn’t here
It isn’t in this place

Because it gave up the green
It gave up the green

When a mind leaves a body
It goes somewhere else
But an unworthy death
Leaves the mind
Twitching like a shrimp
In the endless void

Refresher Course

It is time that I waxed pedagogic
On a subject that’s often confused
By the shallow mass, unschooled in logic,
Who can only attend when amused.

When told that the planet is warming
They snort with an ignorant ease:
“All this talk! I don’t see no warming.
Outside it’s just twenty degrees!”

The problem? It lies in confounding
Two words (and I’m just gonna rhyme it)
I’ll say it at once, and resounding:
That weather is different from climate!

What’s going on right now is weather;
The weather can change on a dime.
But climate’s a pattern of weather,
That gradually changes with time.

But they’re spaced out on Beck and O’Reilly,
They listen with one ear cocked wrong
To pundits abusive and wily
Who cynically string them along.

Their lower lips jut in defiance
Of that which they don’t understand
They’re wholly uneasy with Science
Their votes are, of course, in demand.

Such tender minds, such simple vices,
Somebody bake them a cake!
They boot up their hi-tech devices
And proclaim, “The moon landing was fake!”