Entry Point
If ever I find a method for injecting
flowers into my bloodstream
my poetry is over
Pollen off daffodils
would pockmark my vena cava
Essential red from poppies will sanguine
the aortic freshness even further
When I bleed out
a field of flowers their kinsfolk
will arrive at my defenses
to claim me as their own
completed camouflage
a horse, vaguely Trojan, stanching
a likelier, more gruesome end
To Pick a Wildflower
Yet another hardship of being
emerges in the triteness of our thinking it so
When we vase a fistful of dandelions
when we arrange what will become
a still life
we settle into a realm of oughtness
like cupping our hands to capture
running water
Beside a brook I once wandered into
a patch of trillium snaked around my ankles
Nominally elemental by the sound of it
trillium
this series of ornaments
white against green stalk & fern
gussies itself with no missed awareness
that for it to inhabit a vase
is to risk a misdemeanor even should
we feign ignorance or deign our baser selves
A Diary | A Botany
I track my days in chrysanthemums
given in times of mourning
(Must a diary of flowers swap out dates for petals?)
I scour hydrangeas for signs of another birthday
for Buddha amid the dregs of a tea bath
(Could this page serve as a napkin for cannibals?)
I weep in earnest at the anachronist’s portent
of catastrophe’s onslaught gone by
(For me to be sincere in my belief
my disbelief must be insincere)
I must believe in all things as flowers do
I count myself honest when I profess
my wish to be ground down one day
to people a garden bed for flowers
(Is this actually about flowers? Real flowers? Is this about flowers at all?)
Eros Is Eros Is Eros
The touch of a rose’s maw
to my exposed skin makes me
peal out
from petals so milky in shades
from flaxen to pearl
A stampede threatens to choke
the life out of any given wildebeest
A nerve ending traverses the dangers
of a worn down neural pathway
as quick as an earthquake
as sudden as death’s blow
knocking against a heavy oak door
A Sense of Design
as with the warts & knobs of the ginger root
I gnaw on to settle my churning gut
the gestalt necessarily implicated in my surmising
leaves me playing peekaboo with orchids
In order to appreciate the impossibility of vanilla
all we need do is consider its accepted status as
aerial root. O unfletched perfumed arrow
strike me down where I stand
The Wake-up Robot Problem
“The wake-up robot or global positioning problem is more difficult than the position tracking problem, since the robot does not know its initial position. It has to localize itself from scratch.”
— Rudy Negeborn, Robot Localization and Kalman Filters: On Finding Your Position in a Noisy World
In a new place a robot must localize
or else give up its right to call itself
a robot
The engineers & programmers play peekaboo
& must cover their faces with translucent
skin prototypes
if the robot loses its way & fails
to account for its strange surroundings
What is left
of autonomy hard-won through patches attaches
to another more promising program
as if a spectral
form of freedom itself & quite unbecoming
for any developing software seeking
an outlet
electrical or otherwise. The problem
here is not the robot failing or human
oversight
The problem is what if the robot succeeds
The problem is what to do with the deserts
housing the abandoned
robot colonies. The problem is what to do
when the robots unionize to have a chance
to appreciate flowers
for the very first time. This may result in forests
losing the right to classify themselves
as such
An Apology Is No Single Event but a Shift in Our Modality of Being
I write a poem to wonder aloud at the monument
erected as every lid closes
coffin or eye
I pick a flower to will myself
to be the one of us who blinks first
call this courage
In the circles I run in I carve out a field
with my heavy footfalls
cramping this prairie chorus
GO deeper
〰️
GO deeper 〰️
Read the interview here.
