Bring the morning to a boil and by suppertime
you will have something on which to chew.
When the sun comes through the shades
the shades have nothing to say about prison
except imagine if we turned the lines
the other way. Everyone would be climbing
then, instead of staring at the shadowed inscription
of vertical lines on their chests, lines
that reach up and blanket the eyes, and through
optical illusion or reality appear to go on
forever. There was a dog in a pin and it yelped
until the sun went down. There was a man
in a pin who yelped only in the darkness.
In this manner the source of the voice appears
to be nothing or the darkness. And if you're reading
me as I think you are, you understand
that weather systems are nothing more
than gigantic prison bars. There I go again
supplying industrial metaphor to the natural
landscape. It always seemed metaphor was supposed
to work the other way. My heart is a willow tree.
My eyes the cool brown puddles. And prison, friends,
is nothing more than finding your way into a cave
which then appears to have no way out.
I resist these temptations, but if the devil dared me
to jump, I'm not sure I wouldn't ask how high.
The meaning of my meaning rests somewhere
around the mean of our collective experience.
If I am average than it is our average. A bird
once told me that life is nothing more
than a small cage that encompasses the end
of what is imaginable. And when the bird
stopped speaking she flew away into the morning,
which was a space between me and a tree line
in the distance, until she was gone even beyond
that space, and I could see nothing more.