Stop focusing your energy
on the effectively useless,
always selective,
always tenuous,
always exclusive,
always revocable,
First Amendment,
right now.
right fucking now.
Continue reading “americans of empathetic, inclusive and courageous consciousness:”my mother turned 75 years-old yesterday
and that’s all i know,
about her
anymore
in mid-July, the summer-resident barn swallows who had successfully raised and launched four fledglings by June 23rd, 2025, attempted to raise a second brood;
while i am not absolutely sure if it was the same set of parents or another in the barn swallow community that utilized the nest — as there is a collective of more than a dozen swallows that visits and assists in feeding sometimes too — it is most likely they are the same parent pair;
this is the second summer the barn swallows have nested here in my barn — using last year’s well-constructed nest which they attached to one of the joists like a balcony cantilevered on a Chicago highrise;
i began leaving the overhead barn door open when i first noticed them circling and investigating the barn a few years back; and i was thrilled last year when they began construction of their nest — they were so very welcomed and wanted here — i now know to leave the barn door raised from mid May through July to give them access.
the absurdity of the beauty of this dawn moment,
the absurdity
of the normalization of any moment or day, in life,
of the uninhibited and unselfconscious public documentation of both the ordinary and the excesses of life
simultaneous to
the People of Gaza documenting
Israeli Zionists
confining, starving, shooting, bombing, maiming, killing
and
incinerating
children,
in Palestine.
My dear friend, of two intense, revelatory years of intimate and prolific communication
coming into full being as a crone, one thing i have learned — and practice — is to not suppress my emotions or thoughts
whether in private, shared, or public space
but to feel or express them right then (with very rare exceptions) —
and to NOT control “my smiles and cries”
i spend a significant amount of time solo —largely, by choice,
so, when I feel immense grief or joy, or experience beauty or pain, humor or outrage,
i let my tears
or my teeth
or my uvula
or my tongue
or
my voice
be in the moment,
and this often manifests even if i am in a public space
i have become as uninhibited and honest — as a young child,
or — as someone on their death bed.
Continue reading ““smiles and cries””i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.
earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.
i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.
no matter.
the matters:
the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.
i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.
in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.
Continue reading “waiting for the bough to break”i resist stirring, opening my eyes, or thinking
as the dog wakes, and waits
i am in the center of another dawn-dream,
on the precipice of
experiencing some thing, of understanding some thing
but it cannot hold,
evaporating
with every
slouch toward consciousness
i open my eyes to
the grey of the room, to the dark white gyre of the sky through these generous windows
i open my ears
to the beat
of crystals pummeling these generous windows,
once and again, realizing
i possess slow thighs,
heavy lungs, a heavier heart,
an entire weighted mass,
and a mind — less than half-known / half-known
i want to re-bury myself in the warm sands of sleep, the enveloping weightless numb
and drift back to
the liminal/
this must be the
feeling
of the fully-gestated
unborn fetus, warm,
quiet, still
waiting to be born
yet resisting being known, moving on
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
Regular firearm, deer hunting season began yesterday in Michigan, United States of America, and the crack of rifles and the blast of shotguns destroy both peace and life.
There is some version of a legalized, defined kill list or belated, legalized “protection list” for nearly every non-human animal being population on Earth. And, for human animal being populations on Earth too.
What defines murder for human beings, of the human animal body?
INTENT.
All Hunting is INTENT – intent to kill.
All animal “livestock” agriculture is INTENT — intent to kill for profit.
Genocide is INTENT.
Continue reading “contemplating intent, consent, kill lists and ceasefire: deer hunting season, regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2024 Michigan, U.S.”Dear Americans:
When you finally realize that the solution to the economy — rent and groceries (not the stock market, not your investment portfolio), to health and healthcare, bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, the climate crisis, to environmental destruction — of land, air, and water and biodiversity, to wealth inequality, to systemic racism/white supremacy, to colossal, empire-sized military and police budgets — and endless overt and proxy wars and ongoing GENOCIDE — CAN NOT and WILL NOT be found in the BALLOT BOX — blue or red,
— then what?
then, what will you do? will you hope to ride it out quietly with whatever measure of privilege you possess (white male, white adult, middle-classed, usefully employed in the systems of government or institutions of political or corporate power)?
Will you finally rise up and do the necessary-yet-awful, brave, brutal and hard work to resist and fight — like every dignified human collective across history and even today — like the Palestinians? Like the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho? Like the Maroons of Haiti — or will you be like the Germans — roll over, fall in line, bide your time — hope they come for your neighbor or coworker instead; maybe even turn them in?
This “nation is a massacre”, it always has been
for tens of millions of people right here of and on this land — and for hundreds of millions globally — even if that excludes you and yours (for now).
Enough of this profane American existence.
Enough already.
Continue reading “Open Letter to Americans”
and this Autumn, and last, and every season in between have required so much Auden
if you’re seeing this, you’re alive,
though dying — no matter your age, health, relative safety, relative comfortability —
on this living, though suffering and actively dying, planet
Earthlings and Earth together in a protracted hospice
right now, in these brief years, these grief years,
we are the “ever-living ghosts of what once was”
a “was” that most all of us alive this morning have never known as lived experience — save for the untouched tribes — 10,000 Uncontacted Peoples — 10,000 unsystematized, “uncivilized”
and the Ocean, and the few, still-standing Ancient One Trees; the untouched Desert, and the Mountains — even the youngest of them — The Tetons and The Himalayas, know what it “was” to be alive.
we are mere ghosts, walking dead.
i offer purple bouquets
rooted in the ground,
not dying, wasted, in vase or pot
this purple
reflected in your eyes, my eyes
monarchs married in our october gaze
we’re not long for this world, we, monarchs, asters, and crone
still, we feast, without any gluttony, waste or fear
one of us, prepares for honeymoon flight to Mexico
where marigolds and death await
later, birds with bellies filled by aster, will seed a known, unknown future
crone’s eyes full and clear, she sees it all, near and far, past, present, future, winter and spring
she is rooted too, laughing and grieving in the threshold
between death and the future, future and the death
between remnant wild and final ravagement
between time and anti-time
thousands of purple petals cascade from her crown chakra like asters //
Continue reading “asters, monarchs & crone”
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 