I Am the Pristine

I am the pristine
and fruitful
you say god made me and was happy
today he and i sat watching the sunrise

and told each other of our families

he sat in a woven-plastic folding chair

which his skin stuck to

and i fashioned my seat

from a swirling of my twig fingers

and a kiss of river water

i smile at my little brothers
dressed in green sprouts and bare branches
by their constant internal crises
not yet accustomed to the way each fall changes them

my sisters are the revolution
i told him
they are the weeds that fight back the concrete
the only trees on lonely hilltops
they've always hung over every wall in Berlin

rotted their lowest limbs, raging, just too slowly

to let the strange fruit slip back to their feet 

i splayed my wood-digit fingers just atop the ground between us

"my lineage is here," i said

these halls are where my family stretches to one another

and you should know, man-god

this is also where we keep the letters

your family writes for us

it is our hell and torture

not to wrap our limbs

around those of you who embrace us

not to shudder till our bark-skin crumbles

and twist you softly into our rings

for long and fond remembering

we will you sweetness from our flesh

and beckon you to our shade

some time ago

our families' affair

was not so star-crossed as all this

but you climbed out of the canopies

and took to the prairie

found fire and fist to conquer an old friend

the river god no longer retaliates

the world's not flat

and Olympus has fallen

you've taken the honey from your tongue

and laced your blood with metal

you were what you ate

old friend

now you are what you make

it is lore in our world

that man was once

the apprentice of the sun

we made our scriptures from your old words

took them to be a dispatch from the star's cherished ones

mankind was the New Testament

in our old covenant

with helio's burning

i fear, though

you've forgotten your youth

and to this hill i've come

diplomat

on behalf of a world reeling

beneath and around you

there are those in my family

if i let them

who'd loop their vines

and suffocate themselves

just to parch and flush your lungs blue

your children have sprayed the earth

danced and lauded amidst the poison

sold themselves on the genius that will kill us all

they are the toddlers with a pistol

who don't yet know the dissuasive voice of gun powder

my world is stirring a coup

to remove the young prince

from the throne his doting sun

bestowed upon him,

come what may from the Solar King,

stood over his dead sons' bodies

he'll never recover the crown

our thorns are master guardsmen

go into the fold and fury

of your anomaly

your mind,

you must know

to have your grandparents

blown from the footprints of their past

shredded and burned to shelter excess

your roots would goosebump the earth

there are those amongst you

who watched their children's bodies

hung and strung to dry

and then brittle, they were splintered

and named kindling

to stoke the fires of modernization

the same convlusions now crack our conscience

the probes you push in us

and the needles you've used to innoculate our kind

have made us epileptic

and please know this,

we will shake your instruments

and you

from our skin

for every stand still loyal,

each tract still clutching letters from your former self

there are a thousand who will not catch you after death

will leave your abandoned bones on intact display

for eternal contempt in the dwarfing soil expanse of our hallways

we debate you

as devil or foolish saint

the oldest of us confused over old scripture

but on the scale of the massacre

we are all agreed

you are our leading cause of death

you set down the wise humble ways

of a race that fears the world which birthed it

and think you've made it your slave

now you are the lesser-minded occupier

drawing attention to itself

from the impatient sky and ill-tempered ocean

whose single, one winded breath

contains all that will be and has been

for the infant and dwindling brevity of the existence of men

on the time of redwood and rainforest

mountain life and laughing coral

our two families have just hours to reconcile

grasses still wish to kiss your skin,

our forests learn something of consciousness

from the gardening of your dreams,

with you, on hilltops, we can admire our small belonging

we'll lend our fingers to your writers

and make home in one another

but you must summon your family

shoutdown and crush the voice

which sounds to us like wardrums

for we will not lose this place

to closed eyes and inflated minds

we will simply remain

and somewhere,

i promise you friend,

i will keep those old notes,

in the best of man's bone frames

fashioned in memory of you.