spring is about action

spring is effort: growth is a fight

a handful of seeds is a savings account, a jar full of coins is a fallow field — is next year’s harvest

spring is the championship season, rooting for the future

spring is a coil ready to jump up & forward
a bounce in a step, a leap in a heart

spring should not be a recoil
from rapid-fire death then slippery slop (stet) discourse
from those who believe that a well-regulated militia is them

spring should be a sunburst
not a burst of rounds
not a rifling through of excuses
from owners spurting endless consent
to america tenaciously breaking

from my cold dead hands america breaking
until the cows come home america breaking
until how many loved ones don’t come home, america

breaking

falling to pieces
over sporting & fun to shoot

the american cannon is shattered, is gunmetal skies,
is too much iron in the blood

our bodies are not corrosion resistant

we are as red as these blood-soaked grounds, we are as white as the ghosts of hatred & racism that planted this poison garden, this gethsemane, where we betray our own every day,
we are the blue pallor of the dead

we give bullets the last word

we are chips off the ol’ glock
we are a flaw in life liberty happiness,
in amber waves of grain, we are eroding shoulders—
even purple mountain majesties have a brink
(a big) if america started as a summit, it’s a valley now; a sinkhole

we are shards, we are crags

of bedrock of foundation of crumbling bridges of erected walls of monuments
that have carved themselves into the stoney mindset that we are not all the same while not enough ask the question

why aren’t we sitting down at the table of brotherhood of sisterhood

& dreaming up a place where the red hills have a dream too:
that we’ll quit coloring them with our children’s lives
why aren’t we at that table building a feast & protecting our homes with knowledge & grace & real truth instead of gobbling up our super-sized weaponry & pulling steel quilts over our cold bodies at night because the dark brings all the reasons why we’d rather do nothing in the light

we are the gardeners of this war

we are raising shooters instead of shoots, we are eating bullets, we are sprinkling our greens with gun powder, we are picking flowers too soon, we are throwing our coins into the wind,

we are blowing us all away

we are ordering take outs every day

we are eating shells in red sauce

spring should be daffodils & tulips & crocuses
not croaking us 1 by 1 by 17 in rapid succession & we could keep counting to 26 or 49 or 58 or stop at 14 or 10 or 4 but why bother talking about the little ones
because we’ve been desensitized, amendmentized;
we’ve been number two-ed

spring is the pacifist

yet barrels outshine the brilliance of a morning glory growing from a grave truth that everywhere we are stands above the timeless music of decomposition that gives soil back its life

so that it can try

again

to remind us that
a seed is never a bullet
but a bullet is always a seed
planting bodies in a soil
that is too water-logged & salty now to
grow
anything

without spring
without change
all we are is
empty pockets & full graves