Our Haven

The trees are our haven, a mother wrapping her skirts around her young. Like children, we fill her caverns as her folds are blown violent. We feel ourselves swaying with her branches, enchanted in the beginning. But, as all children do, we turn rebellious, kicking in the very womb of our Mother Nature. We rush to these trees like rain and burn them like the desert sun, trying to make life, nature, hate herself as we’ve learned to do. Our wars break out, flooding like midnight sea urchins wrapped around her rooted feet, pushing her off balance.

We are the frantic ants in the traffic jam of common identity. We beg forgiveness only when she threatens to abort us, sticking our jagged death into the veins of life—to take a breath and a sip. Like many psychosomatic illnesses, self-imposed amnesia sets in and we twist in re-birth, making umbilical cords lift our chins to stare at ourselves mirrored in the translucent flesh. Our pasts and futures whisper to us from the forest of time. We burn the leaves to inhale the ash of present, making the sky come tumbling down, but leaving enough black smoke to make Chicken Little clouds.

We realize that God was put into a tree to be destroyed for paper and that our ancestors used God to write the bible, not the other way around. And now that they’ve written out eternity, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We weave Heaven, Hell and Earth into one. There is nowhere else to go but here and we can never leave.

This is what paints the grass red and the sky a sickening pale green.

We multiply such self-righteous perceptions through our own seed.

And we rebuild nothing that we haven’t already somehow destroyed.