Sonnet #234

To sing of miracles, let us sing the spiders' song
This misty early spring, rains crystallize the webs
the architecture glistens like a crystal silk and strong
so strong to hold the weight of water; how did
these tiny minds build up to this from Darwin's years?
Surrounded by such miracles we can't even stop
to enjoy in all this rain, I sing of tiny spiders
how small their arms, how small their lot
Inventing in the corners of the world their dazzling
Made for no one, beauty for no sake at all
Despite eight eyes, they never admire the puzzling
shapes and countershapes that form their whole
The tremor in the web beneath their feet
is all they know, a tense vibrato of life and defeat

Sonnet #233

For years, they've heard us all complain
About those kids, how they are doing things wrong
How they do not know anything, their songs
are not even music, and they're lazy and complain

We have told them they are ruined by trophies
They do not deserve, in skills they'll never master
Better than anyone that came before, We're the faster
We're the ones who know things, our stories

Are the best stories, we tell truths to them
and they ought to listen because we accept the dust
of how things are, we know, we are powerless, then
We say, nothing ever changes: If things get hard, all must

They've seen us howl, seen how we will not save them
It seems, now, instead, they have decided to save us

Sonnet #232

Would you sacrifice your life for gas
station burritos? Someone did. They bled
with all their friends and lovers dead
And carved into pieces, saran-wrapped, passed
into machines; also every bean contained
the possibility of flowers, the hope of mothers
Every kernel, stalk of green, all other
pieces of this tepid slab had holiness

This is why to make food poorly is a sin:
Oh, Life! What did these beautiful ones die for?
If we must kill to live, let us honor those done in
Who gave their children for our children, nor
should we allow the hungers quotidian
to permit us to forget how death's head roars

Sonnet #231

As I live, I hide these nests inside my hair
Where songs are born, slip out, take wing
I try to say the growths are merely things
Long lost, leftovers of childhood. ignore the singing.

As I live and work, just mind gradiations,
Foraging patterns, all that stuff that spirits do
With all of us, passing through their iterations
As if they never stopped to hatch and grow anew

But autumn comes, and I see my leaves descend
And I, uncaring who may know or see
What's been hidden until the wind rends
loose these dying papers, scattered leaves

These nests I hold, here, all of them are mine
I lift them up; I protect; the birds return in time

Sonnet #230

Everything we see and everything we touch
Began as a dream in somebody's head
All tools are imagined, all laws come from beds
where dreamers rise to wake their world as such

All the dreamers I know live out on the edge
They tread water in dreams, burn all their wax
They work twice as long, pay twice the tax
Every time the bills come due, all bets must have hedge

The state of the union where dreamers are poor
The state of the union where dreamers work late
The state of the union where delusions of grandeur
Are met with terror and mockery, hate
The state of the union where making art and poetry
Means fool's uselessness, merit so hungry