Sonnet #257

If everyone is sick and no one is well
(No one who is well stays well for long)
And everything is dying, and everything is wrong
Each ecology breaks against our buy and sell
And every body, too, it breaks, we’re bought, sold
The diseases are investments to the ones who own
They also own the things that sicken, and break bones
But no one is to blame, each share is tinily held
By the very people who are sick and never well
That own the shares in the ones who harm
And the ones who sell the medications to get well
We own our own destruction. It’s ours. It’s warm.
Wrap up in the happy death, the bright slow death
Invest, while you’re living in the graves and wreaths

Sonnet #256

I think I know what comes next for you,
You'll lie awake at night, exhausted, unrested,
Dreaming of a world you can control at its best
And seeing around you all the shoestring and glue
That keeps a day together for you and yours
The signs all point to glory: ads sell beauty, grace
A pathway to material expression, all friends' faces
smile in pictures where they give you tours
of lives best lived, and late at night the trembling
comes, the fears of work and unwork, the horror
of the next interactions with your own dissembling
I know - I know - I know that sleep's a tremor
Passing in shadows, where dreams do no mending,
I say: Abandon These Dreams. Hope, love -- these feed no terrors.

Sonnet #255

Things that clean the skin and kill infections:
Salt and acid waters pouring out from inside skin
The sweat that drenches washes us from within
And sunlight dries the damp and mold, is our protection
And moving bodies flush the blood through stiff
The way we move, the hard or gentleness depends
Upon the manner of our frustrations and how well bends
Still it heals, it all heals, all this hard summer heft
I have a stump in back and when I am sickly take the axe
In all weather, I take the mattock and dig and churn
It is not so mighty of a stump but it still grows back
And racing roots I work to break the deepness and spurn
Where all roots spread, to haul it up from earth, my back
Cracks where the metal hits the tree, it heals — I burn.

Sonnet #254

Flow like water, In your life, be water, say the wise

Where I live rich men drain the aquifer
They reroute rivers and bottle up water
From the delicate places, wrap in plastic fly
It over land in huge trucks, or sell water rights to cities
Desalinate for cities, huge, impossible palaces
Cool and soft in hard, dry places, crowded offices
Pull water in pipes up, fountains, green grass, pretty
Where ten miles out the sand blows like Ozymandias
Waiting out the rich men and their water, all that water
Water everywhere, and all of it to drink, our land of this
Rerouted stuff, to reach a limit.
                                                    Flow like water
Say the wise, let life’s flow pour like water, towards the rich
Pour into their labor forces and desert mortgages: don’t resist.