apoem

y'all liked this one in the meeting.


Punk Trees

Walking with the punk trees,
The young ones that grew mohawks after public works
Trimmed them down, thinned them out.
You notice how they take back the air
By growing into it.

Our talk rises up
With them, around the telephone wires.
Ice insulates our words, guarding them like bark
So they cannot be tapped.

We talk about how we’re young, too
Making a complete mess of things.
We make jokes of math we can’t understand,
But see perfectly in the trees
Two branches from one
And so forth
And so on,
Until we see the imperfect symmetry in ourselves,
Agree, “gee, I’m a tree!”
We then reach to each other through the cold
grinding our barks until we learn
about the mess inside of us.

The wind tells these jokes.
We listen, waving limbs to catch the words,
Try to repeat them back to each other, laughing, swaying
Too hard, thinking we got the punch line right when really,
The joke is on us -
Rubbing down between our tough skin until
A sticky mess, the juice of truth, runs down to fuse our roots,
Making two trunks into one.