Witness The Black Rooster

It's time now to stop giving a fuck what others think

There are poems I write that sit in my Dropbox untouched for years. These are the experimental poems. The ones so unusual that I assume they can only be for me. They are poems that require context, require prefaces. And since I’ve been taught that any poem that needs explanation is not a good poem, these pieces are never allowed to emerge from their cloistered digital files as they “cannot be good enough.”

Today, watching the dismantlement of the United States from within by a hoard of ‘not good enough’ men—those who seek only to pillage, extract, and fracture instead of creating something better—I began to realize that what is more important than ‘good enough’ is saying the-thing-that-needs-to-be-said, sharing the poem written two years that opened an ancient vibration inside of me and which now infuses all of my work with its magic. If not now, when?

But it is a poem that requires context.

I have an unconventional habit of reading scientific studies for fun and enrichment. In the last several years, science has morphed into of a subgenre of Horror. Watching the slow-motion tsunami of evidence of the coming (now here) climate emergency curving over us through the lens of hard facts, observable data, intelligent extrapolation has been reassuring. Intellectualization is a form of escapism, and I’ll admit to it to indulging in it in the past wholeheartedly.

I’ll also admit I’m an astrology nerd.

So, I’m reading the Sufficient conditions for rapid range expansion of a boreal conifer | Nature, which goes into grave and extensive detail about the rapidly shifting range of North American spruce populations in the Arctic, and later that day stumble upon Ellias Lonsdale’s Inside Degrees—Developing Your Soul Biography Using the Chandra Symbols, a bizarre and mystical interpretation of the meanings of astrological degrees, and I do what any obsessive poet worth her salt does—I rip lines from both and create an amalgam.

This is both found poem, mishmash, my actual planetary natal chart, and a statement about how the trees are quite literally—at a pace only trees can manage—sprinting for the poles to attempt to escape the coming conflagration of planetary warming. It’s a cozy horror story the like has never been witnessed before with my astrological blueprint in mythological language and All the layers-and-metaphorical-overlap I can muster. Maybe it’s not “good enough.” But then, I really couldn’t give a fuck. Even the trees are running away from the nightmare we’ve created.

Regardless, I hope you—my dear 3 or 4 readers—like it. Or I hope it blows something loose in your dreams like it did me.

Either way, You’re Welcome, I’m sorry, Thank You, and I Love You. Take whatever you need and leave the rest.

[Due to the alternative line spacing I’ve chosen for this piece, please view on a wide screen device—if possible.]

Witness the Black Rooster


The albedo is 
                                                     the ratio of light received by a body to
                                                 the light reflected by that body; a black jaguar 
beneath full moon.
                                                  We describe a large, expanding population of 
                                                   young, vigorous, sexually reproducing white
spruce walking north
                                                    away from the equator, nearly three miles 
                                                    every ten years; the break-and-run visible 
from our satellites.
                                               Some appear mechanically broken, antler-raked by
                                              migrating caribou; a chariot pulled by four elephants. 
There is something 
                                                   here: loss, an unexpected botanical diaspora, 
                                                  trees as refugees; blackbirds flying out of a pie. 
A magician wearing 
                                                a live snake for a belt speaks of individual growth 
                                                  as implicit constraint, vital population rates; 
the harsh landscape
                                                  of moon against a black sky; the relatively 
                                                  high nutrient availability of warming soils;
how heavier wind, 
                                                       denser cone crops, deeper snowpack; 
                                                             a woman giving birth to twins 
sustains an advance; 
                                                  all of this evidence of mechanisms on the verge 
                                                     of the stochastic. As the story goes, it was
the chameleon—moving 
                                                   pictures on her back who was the first to identify 
                                                   all shadows—the island just visible off the coast,
the tremendous boulder 
                                                   hovering over the ocean.  The only true state 
                                                    of non-conflict is inertia, or so the outline 
of a building 
                                                 (the only part remaining, the cornerstone,) claims.
                                                 At the time of publication, at least seven of eight 
of the dead                                  
                                                           adult conifers were still standing.