​Seeds drift on winds across plains
Like birds on wings carrying nourishment
For young chicks yearning for food
Eating with want and vitamin starved

Food deserts proliferate in inner cities 
Impoverished wholeness
Priced out of reach
Only wealth buys nutrients

Safety from pesticides never guaranteed
Created in wars gone by
Carcinomas of production, consumption  
Never to provide health

Inputs cost more than outputs generate
Government subsidized cultivation
Subsistence sprayed pesticides
Increasing Indigenous costs exponentially

Droughts and fires decimate lands
Wars and borders shift families and villages
Away from ways that reproduce in ancient ways
Not terminated with one seed or one crop

Seeds drift on winds across plains
Like birds on wings carrying nourishment
For young chicks yearning for food 
From nature that cannot be bought

Failures in judgment lead to vices
Unjustified through alibis
Irrational rationalizations
Giving rise to pipe dream
Aspirations unmitigated
Cosmos to blame
For lacking narcissistic abundance

Circular swirls of dust specks
Give way to lapses in space
Time continuums of aged wrinkles
Folding in like layers
Of glass and planes revealing
Multidimensional gaps that suck
Light particles through lifetimes
To once again rinse and repeat 

Should-haves and would-haves fill corners
With cobwebbed regrets on death bed sheets
Longing and dreaming dreams unfulfilled by believing
In the story of can't and couldn't
Buckets are not made to carry lists 
They are hard on the feet and burden the Soul

Tentacles extend and wrap
Veiny vines into darkness
Into souls
Rooted, anchored
In web circuits embedded in mesh
With connectivity to time and place
 Of passing worms and voles as the spread
Enfolds Spirits

Rocks, boulders crumble
In rubble piles that
Litter my ground
Green and yellow wisps
Create fields of blooms who reach,
Grasp skyward toward clouds
Who oversee the remains of once was 
And will become

Roots deep in Virginia clay
Red, iron rich
North Carolina towns of tobacco and cotton
Land where my ancestors roamed
Gone with decay, sprawl and time

Places once sacred now lost to harbors of silt
My bones carry my creation, my myths
Confederates and slaves merging
One lineage, of one line 
Their ghosts live were I live

Held in place by memories
Of trees and creeks

Every morning the same
The cat
The dog

Both thinking
"I'm ready"
"Why not you?"
​
Every morning the same
I tell them
"Some of us don't have built-in clothes"

Don't Cuss...What?
That's Bullshit
Where does authenticity come from?
The heart...the head

Places in between and in betwixt
That nowhere-land
A complexity of happiness
Splattered with grief and smudged by hope

Cautiously revealed to others
Graciously accepted by Self

Permutation shifts
When light bulbs become
Revelations that burn lumens
In multitude
As glare floods
Into new juxtapositions
A moment of transposing
​The student becomes you