We’ve been asked
to make ourselves
in one more way.
To craft an
image of us
just as we like.
Tag: creative writing
Two crows on a telephone pole
crow about their neighbors, but I
have learned to live alone, I know
none of my neighbors, I stay by
my computer, or by my phone.
I step outside to say hello.
They drop their gazes and start home.
I can only guess what they know.
They live so quickly, myself not as fast.
They fasten no valve on emotion.
Nor am I able to either at times.
Nor do either of us know what we are.
The difference must be the sense we have
of ourselves as one of two kinds, subject
or object, the one acting out who they are,
the other not believing they’re acting at all. Continue reading “Reality TV Romance”
A congress of dogs ambassadors
between wooden legs
of coffee shop benches
a sunny, chilly November.
But my dog he died last year.
I have no ambassador.
My boy died last September
and I don’t have his nature
Science tells us the process exists
in the thing itself. A chimpanzee
is the sum of its processes, both
kinds within and without, one
metaphor of iteration at all scales.
Physiognomies, behaviors, moods
multiplied out of primordial soups,
spermatogeneses, ancestors as large
as sperm, once the largest things
living on the face of the earth.
All this in the glassy look
of a chimpanzee clumsily
shucking nut-paste with a spatula
fashioned from a broken stalk.
R. Charboneau
Robert Charboneau. 