I think disaster zooms in and I have to zoom out
A hurricane Old Testaments a Florida beach
Then, in a Indiana small town entirely murderless,
a building older than electricity
lazily implodes on a drizzly night
I mind's eye'd the limb pulled out of the innocuous rubble.
Next morning I don’t even live there anymore
This coincidence I worship as irrational grace
New buildings are in my periphery
I smoke another on a new set of wooden stairs
I have smoked many cigarettes on a many wooden stair
I have perched like ritual the coffee mug on the railing
I in wistful ritual imagine the cup crashing down
Not even with a false movement
but as if discord be a shouldered devil
I shadowly picture the cup crashing down,
Exploding its brown blood
and myself moodily picking up the tiny rubble
From the white noise in the corner of the mind
buzzes a mite of ash whispered off the end:
Might this cigarette burn all the wooden stairs
and cook the brick walls clean of their clinging ivy?
Might I with a finger tap
send doom twirling to all the midwestern gardens?
A tractor with a full tank explodes in the middle
of it’s inferno’d corn
(I imagine the raspy husks so flammable)
I ease off it or it’s like:
I obsess minutely but steadily these projections
I mask well that such misfortunes buoy my perceptions
Mask so well in a kind of compromising,
Coping,
Carelessness
——
Hiking in Tennessee,
Vantaged over forest fire patches
Exhausted and exerted,
I smoked a single cigarette
-What are you doing?
What am I doing?
Ceaselessly
I am practicing peace after extreme effort
I am neglecting cancers itch at my throat
I am double saying:
I wouldn’t do that & that won't be me
I go downhill, eased within gravity
and my thoughts are flighty
as I, prey-innocent,
evade the grizzly at the flank.
Bloodstains, tattered bushes, magic thinking in the busheled bison berries what peace does a sleep in a cave promise...?