distant, keeps odd hours. A foreigner, regarded with a mixture of bemused tolerance and mistrust.
Category: epigrams and conundrums
The tree caught in a tree cannot be untreed except by rot.
This is a proverb from some far-away land where the Peter principle does not apply, and only the least competent are entrusted with the most important jobs.
Say what you will about the lizard brain;
it would be useful to have an unblinking third eye to keep track of the sun.
At the encampment of the damned,
there’s so much less fornication than at the encampment of the saved.
Mountains so long and low
we forget after a while that they aren’t the horizon, that their trees don’t go on forever, that the sky is wider than we can know.
I dreamed the angel of death was a bland functionary
who kept giving me forms to fill out.
In a dream, I extricate myself from your embrace
to rescue children drowning in a river. One of them has already grown fins and a tail.
I dream I’m possessed by a demon who gives me seizures.
No pain, no gain, he makes me hiss through a throat stretched thin as a telephone line.
As the green drains from the leaves,
why doesn’t it pool underground
like a reservoir of eternal summer?
Why don’t the green, leaf-shaped katydids
turn brilliant colors before they die?
When lovers intertwine, why don’t they fuse
like roots from adjacent trees?
If a human falls in a city and there are
no trees around, does it leave a hole?
I dreamed I was at a picnic table across from Donald Trump.
But he wasn’t president, just a racist old relative with appalling fashion sense, and everyone else was pretending he didn’t exist.
