steps away

open that door of that car you drive
on some street you so often see
step strangely past those dust lanes
those church strewn streets, those alleys
you hid in with your cute girlfriend, your guyfriend,
your marijuana. take steps,

walk with legs unused to finding new places
made of earth, legs made of that same earth
you eat every day in your cereal, your eggs and toast.
walk past that broken fence that some man paid

a hundred dollars for some other man who builds fences
to build out of trees that some other man cut
green rooted, growing wet out of the earth
under the sun.

feel those wood bones and see all those bugs,
all those ants who know every cranny of those bones
and they know them, their home. a million ants.
and you left your home made of bones and your car,

your car burning the blood of ancient monsters,
the dinosaurs, killed by god's own hand and boiled
'neath the earth for a million years till it ran black,
black for you and me to burn in our cars,
god's own gift to our cars, our new creatures of burden.

walk past the ants' bone home and you'll see another,
some other or another, of a bird, a squirrel, a snake
or a man, they all live together and only they see
the difference and the boundaries. their songs are different.

would you walk away from the road? paved monster's-blood black
and step with two warm-blooded feet, covered in cotton
and rubber over a million years richness and water
into the trees? spiders spin silk homes there and leaves
strewn like carpet. and the songs are different.

and the animals there listen...
and wait, and they are afraid, because
they eat one another.