The valuable
to me
smells voluble;
speech that preaches
while it practices
spending its tactics
profligately
in service of
strategic massiveness.
That is how you cook
an interesting life:
in the stew that sweats through
every kind of plant.
Eventually,
every volume
turns elegant
one before or after
eleven.
Turned,
held,
melded together
these factors of living production
also manufacture death.
And that is how a tree
falls down and becomes
just as elongated in death
as elegant in bloom.
Blood becomes hands
when it flows to the flowers.
Roses torn from their beds
can wake up years later
and believe that fire
renews
while it also
destroys.
Can I say it simpler?
It would be less beautiful.
Can we be cleverer?
That would neuter
our language
and give it up
to esoteric flowages
in the basin of a single mind.
Roman Ryan 