No time at all

You forget the rain,

Blur into its

Monotony.

Between root and breath,

No difference–

It’s all hard work.

Your wet body burns

From the bones out.

One Thing After Another

So many true paths.

A wealth of exceptional teachers.

Countless rivers I’ve never fished.

Love’s possibilities defying math.

All these dirty dishes.

Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon
Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock

Amalgam of electric jelly,

constellated neural knots

in the briny binary soup,

as surely as stimulus prods response

brains are made to choose.

And through a major error in pattern recognition

or a significant cognitive fault,

the bullfrog’s brain has selected

a two-pound rock

as the object of his rampant affection,

a rock (to my admittedly mammalian eye)

that neither resembles

nor even vaguely suggests

the female of his species.

He does seem to be enjoying himself

in a blunted sort of way,

but since the rock so obviously remains unmoved

one suspects it’s not the blending of sweet oblivions

that fuels his persistence,

but a serious kink in a feedback loop–

or perhaps just kinkiness in general.

The less compassionate might even call him

the quintessentially insensitive male.

Assuming a pan-species gender bond

and a common fret,

I advise my amphibious pal,

“Hey, I don’t think she’s playing hard to get.

That’s the literal case you’re up against, Jack–

true story, buddy; stone fact.

And I’d be fraternally remiss if I didn’t share

my deep and eminently reasonable doubt

that she’ll be worn down

however long and spectacular the ardor.”

Ignoring my counsel

as completely as he has my presence,

the bullfrog continues his fruitless assault

with that brain-locked commitment to folly

which invariably accompanies

dumb, bug-eyed lust.

But, in fairness,

whose brain hasn’t shorted out in a slosh of hormones

or, igniting like a shattered jug of gas,

fireballed into a howling maelstrom

where a rock indeed might seem a port?

One can only conclude

that such impelling concupiscence

serves as a species’ life insurance,

sort of a procreative override

of any decision requiring thought,

thought being notoriously prey to thinking,

and the more one thinks about thinking

the thinkier it gets.

Therefore, though the brain is made to choose,

its very existence ultimately depends

on the generative supremacy of brainless desire–

for with all respect to Monsieur Descartes

you am before you can think you are.

Dirt-drive compulsions riding powerful desires

render any choice moot, along with

reason, morality, taste, manners,

and all those other jars of glitter

we pour on the sticky and raw.

The hard truth is we never chose to choose:

not the brains we use to pick

between competing explanations for our sexual mess

nor these hearts we’ve burdened with our blunders

in the name of love.

Do whatever we decide we will,

the choice isn’t free;

we live at the mercy of more pressing needs.

Thus, urges urgently surging,