Our notion of insect life cycles
is upside-down.
We watch the adult stage
and mourn.
Such a short life.
But nymphs live for
years. Then
one brief moment for sex
and egg laying.
Tag: poetry
!["Noisy Cicada, Male," by LadyDragonflyCC - >;< on flicker (8/30/2011) [Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)]](http://emptypath.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Cicada_1024px-150x150.jpg)
… 
There is no way to
move through life except
to
lift your foot from
where it was
and
place it
farther
ahead.
Image: “Giacomond,” by Quint Buchholz (1984) [Quibu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via
…Until this morning I was
fixed
on boxing things
collected over decades.
Fragile, heavy, old, purchased, given,
all stuff from other moments.
…
There isn’t really an end
to this.
Coasting forward or
drifting sideways or back,
We never reach a goal.
It’s a matter of equilibrium,
homeostasis.
It’s not
a matter of
getting to enlightenment,
… 
Stop wasting
time
being
consciousness.
“You”
does not
exist.
It is a path
of illusory
linear time
through the
sphere
of
Creation
which
is
all
at
Never mind the endless cycling
of what we call news
ensorcelling tales of political theater,
social distress, and un-
natural disasters
things happening
elsewhere.
We are in the salutary midst
of the fall.
What is close
is real.
Think of children
now schooled
I spilled tomato juice on my
flannel shirt my
first year in kindergarten
in a new town with
kids I didn’t know
and they laughed.
It felt like they laughed
at me but
who knows?
When at age four you’ve
just spent weeks in a hospital
and months taking
hot baths and castor oil
but they tell you how lucky
you
How can a virus travel
and not love?
Or are we not now all infected
with shame
at our human nakedness?
We don’t want to know our own evil
so profess good, pretending
to smile without hurting.
So painful.
The Tiananmen butterfly warns us:
cyclones we’ve stirred with our grasping
While the world shudders.
Rain
somehow feels
like starting over.
Waters over the earth
reconnecting
with those beneath.
Do I need to step outside?
Inhaling
the original air.