Will it ever be light again, rehearsing
dogwood ostentation my strong coffee my oranges
fallen tree litter of self-esteem
fawning all over the injurious nonchalance
a stoic echo
the only thing I can do is the frogstand
generous with localised trust
weighting myself behind notched elbows and looking ahead.

How anyone does anything is so wonderful.
Our love is a silviculture
I think of you writing poems on the ferry
proofing each line not for water but blue
somehow, a blueproof era
positively discriminating the emerald wavelength
      from general rainbow.
I am such a sapling bruiser.
The only way I can do anything now
without having a meltdown is to body
double so let’s pretend
we’re working in clearing together
doing our lax returns to the clouds,
brushing our long hair into morning,
putting on eyeshadow the shade of trees.

Next week I’m giving a lecture on green:
the colour and mind, across the garden
and the teenage commotion
what craft is it green requires of us, suffused
in shade
and clumsy rhyme.
My conclusion?
Let’s make a new
garden from old wounds.

*

I’m a bad teacher.
At school I vomit forests, don’t tell anyone

how much it hurt to have twigs in our throat
and to shelter the rabbits, hemlocks, deer and azaleas
I am so hopelessly in love with mosses
prioritising their wet need to exist, kind of spermy
and endless
swallowing freshwater eternities………………….
Lying here
                                          who would need a true root?
Between us
the honey locust is shedding a painful luxuriance…

*

In our sporous commons, theorising
the maidenhair need to be lavishly spritzed
how wishes travel on particulate matters
your birthday terra firma
a real blowout, fan-shaped
spilling our very thin stems
never to let anyone down again
in the ancient carbon algorithm
how good it feels to breathe in sync
with the katydid, indistinguishable from
                            this chlorophyll lease in the canopy
our resonance determined by temperature
a few more molts away from our longing
what’s left for us?

Ownership is gauche when the world is free.
We collect goblin’s gold moss, marshmallows
of overnight shrooms from yew trees;
a wild arboreal kindness
sets its swan on the loch, belonging to all of us
general lustration
among grass, we’re never alone.
I love Marxism best when the plants are included
metabolising lachrymose pollen
unread messages collect like old leaves on my iPhone
the drowsy stars
I don’t mind.