Don’t Think

When a storm rolls in slow it makes no sound. Through sneezing poplars, past the Joe-pye weed, aphids foaming, mayflies riding out their exits. The less you see a thing the more you look for it. Squirrels spooned on a trunk’s dry leeside.

You like to think you’re immune to this stuff

but it’s hard not to be them, given most outcomes. Something wrong with my stars — can’t figure out where the Pleiades are. Why did the sister go to Hartford? Why would she do that? And how could she marry that man? Honey, don’t think. You’re liable to figure me out.

Poe died in a ditch. Wearing another man’s clothes.

Samuel Clemens went bankrupt printing Grant’s memoirs then, in trying to pay it all back, invented stand-up comedy.

The tabloids cashed Amy Winehouse. “I’ve got to go not so far as I can, but just as far as is needed.

Let somebody else say I made a fool of myself.”

When a wind comes in hot it shivers fences,

like the past tense turns any stray page black. It doesn’t matter if you don’t mind, but this world’s a hard place for little things. So let the ants scheme. Cup the green moth midflight with a shortstop’s hands. As usual, night knows what it’s doing. Stay aware to all

exits. Bless what flesh you’ve seared or eaten.

Bury the beer and the fruit fly drinking it with you. Mark sprinting clouds; now shadow, now light rushing after. Constant push then the loud ungluing. They prefer to remain unknown. The clouds, I mean. That is, known briefly, and only from your perspective.