Singing Vegetables, and: Estranged

Singing Vegetables

What little that’s rooted must arise.Like, who plants in cups except kids?

Enter the forest. The forest will eat you,men in balaclavas who haven’t read Marx.

And so on, including the starry skies.You’ve seen a sieve? Explosions unto mesh.

Let meter be robo-voiced, people singinto their devices, augment reality.

GPS sits outside the phone, waiting.Every time girls kick, it leans out of its chair.

There’s hair at the hinge, a trainof thought to be stepped on or off.

Girls are kicking the conductor,the forests are gliding by. It’s night

again, the prom falls to its kneesand begs the queen for a smoke.

Because God. Because God.Not the singing vegetables.

Estranged

How tabloid, those families held apart by the strange, members pig-assed or rage-distorted: Little-Jimmy-who-did-the-dishes or Dahlia-like-the-flower. He passed me at the mall, or so he said. To never again see your father, his blood pulsing yours, is strange. But dynasties branch, adults declare whatever Mine, and nothing but another greed can slough it. Companions mirror us but relatives are us. If the mirror cracks and down falls the husbanded silver, then Strange arrives in a town full of others just as, pistols cocked, noon approaching. Everyone wants to be the hawk overhead, alert to the remains, yet aloof. Deep or high, far from the petty and Getty rationales, he deserves it or just this once, the arm of the beast cut off, and the hawks descend with mighty cries. Yet the beast family lumbers on.

No, it’s evolution, the way the clan strikes out for a homestead as far away as possible, the genes tested with the bravery of alienation: six camels turn into the sunset, with a no-lack-of-water hope borne of anger. Blight, as seed redirects Darwin into the future. But anger will get you only so far. The lopping could save the beast, gangrene in this case as common as the habit of hello. So perhaps the beast mourns and recovers, and the angel of the estranged is cast out or off in that biblical falling. No one wanted to spend taxable dollars on a lawyer. Strange like the melody Doric, the speech of Guinea, someone else’s mother’s food, loud stomping at the door, those computer symbols. Not you, where once was all-you.