poem

 Wilderness

Found myself surrounded by people who all seemed to like themselves. So I escaped through a trapdoor of my own despair and fell down into a brightly lit room with a basic table and on the table a single orange. From one angle the orange looked like a plastic fake. From another it appeared real. Either way I wasn't in the mood. A door opened up onto a single lane road that extended to the horizon, undulating over gentle hills. There was nothing else to do so I followed. The sun was hazy. The sky looked like dirty sea. No birds. No animals. No trees. I suddenly had, what was for me, a bit of an epiphany: This was all my own doing. Everything here was just as it is. The only thing to do was accept it. I reached for a glass of water I knew would be there and of course it wasn’t. I drank it anyway. Above me the clouds parted and God appeared and started to apologize but he wasn’t talking to me. Just in case they suddenly noticed me loitering in the middle of their very private conversation, I pretended to be working on a poem about the scoliosis of the earth’s spine. This whole time I was walking. Once I get started it takes on a life of its own. One step after the next through a landscape of brutalist unoriginality. I would have killed for a single weed. Before too long I found myself entering a dark forest that, depending on how you looked at it, had millions of well trod paths or unfurled as pure wilderness. Of course both were true. The paths are limitless but I could only choose one. I rested for a while on a rock flecked with so much moss it looked infected. I could hear the faraway murmur of falling water. Either that or it was the room above me where all the happy people were probably talking about what to do with me. The longer I rested, the less I cared about their proposals and solutions and the stiffer I became. Not arthritic,old man stiff. More of a languorous immobility. I felt myself rooting into the soil. I had lost all desire to move. Only to grow, to be swayed by an independent force that never stopped to consider its own provenance. If they were to come looking for me here they’d walk right past. I was becoming something else, unrecognizable. This is how forests get made, I suddenly thought. Maybe I was even starting to like myself. 

11/4/24