You can’t just go around
by Brandon Krieg
inventing holidays
blessed malingerer,
you can’t just do
what the universe
relaxes into doing through you
easy as loose ends
of a wind-shredded
flag rise and fall
like a sleeping child’s small ribs
You can’t just have a son,
a single oak
the lines of your life
plow
widening rings around
so sunflowers might embody
far-reaching
energies unsymbolic
to bees,
You can’t just be like a bee
pocketed in gold and gold
deposited in its pockets,
mini-billionaire, whose murmurs on blurry-warm nights
will sometimes have just gone quiet
You can’t just not know why
you took the dark road to flash with headlights
a crossing coyote’s eye,
signaling to satellites
to cease their ceaseless transmissions,
plummet, a thousand undetected Icaruses
into remote seas, sink and transform into
barnacled altars to
the side-eyed indifference
of flounders, skates, and rays:
that unconcern, you can’t
just inhabit that
like a frog so deep in its body
when it blinks the wet corners
of its eyes show it
coated in dust from the road.
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