Well hellooo my cyber-verse home that I hitchhiked away from some ten months ago.
I have found my way back to your familiar white slate.
I'm just feeling it today and want to share my experimental text from a course
I am taking / loving / appreciating called Writing the Natural World. I wrote the following poems on their own individual sheets of sycamore bark I gathered from a neighborhood park. Afterwards, I impulsively scattered my words and wood around a campus tree with branches and leaves that mushroom out to create a hut of green.
...
Transcribed from the
underbelly of Sycamore bark.
[1]
Eyes
are no sacred jewels if the mind is whispered to from senseless masses.
No
sight is the surface if the surface
is hollow.
So
take the cracks and peel them
open.
I
have all to cover for the mass and all to splay for you.
[2i]
Wrapped
around my internal root. Speckled and uniform are these folds
[2ii]
Matted
to my contours. Too rigid and tight but good enough for the masses.
[3]
This
is my hide.
Streaked
and carved with the teeth of the hungry
and
the abrasions from the self.
[4]
Unadorned,
I am raw and flesh and yellow. Weathered grey now yellow.
[5]
Tempted
to shatter with the grace of withering leaves
still
there to please.
To
shatter.
To
shatter and to feel shed of these flakes of me.
[6]
Facades
exhaust the energy I have.
Rigid
and opaque is this border that [ ] up to give features to a mass of masses.
[7]
Exfoliate
me, please.
[8]
Wind,
came to shed me.
Rain,
came to tear me.
Hands,
come to breathe me.
[9]
I
flake and you shudder. These pores are not wounds,
do
think.
[10]
Come,
caress these whorls, these creases of age.
Stale
and tanned from too long a show.
Look up
and
delight in the blotches of yellow that now shine white.
The
weathered tan will come.
[11]
As
if my petals have curled open to welcome all to the nectar within,
I bloom.
From
the limbs that bask among the songbirds and green veins
to the hold of the earth
I slowly flake apart
to
feel the heat and scatter of life my flesh did not allow.
