Half A Dozen Murderous Traps

Oh you are in the wasp's nest now!

Unable to fall to my knees by choice I was gently forcibly brought to my knees.

Unexpected turns in the road. Cats sleeping on the back of the couch, opening their eyes when we sit down to read.

Bowls of popcorn with peanut butter powder and cannabis oil. Rib roasts with fresh sage and thyme. Has anybody ever told you that you look like an envelope that fell in love with its contents?

Kid scissors. Hints of death.

Red hints of hell.

The rules are there to be followed, then gently broken, and then one discovers - on the far side of breaking, outside the so-called law - that they are inside another law, and that it's basically laws all the way down.

That summer they sent state police scuba divers into the lake - two days running - and came up with nothing, much less a body. Suddenly nobody was talking. 

Yet it matters where the comma goes, relates back to speech, to how we think, and finally to how we love. Old barns in which motorcycles are parked. 

Who knows what the rats think up there in the attic, navigating a darkness in which half a dozen murderous traps are set. It's true: choice is the last illusion.

Cardinals in the apple tree, morning coffee and rosary prayers, six a.m., oh grace, oh joy, oh my love.

I find a little wooden turtle at the take-it-or-leave-it shed, and take it, and put it on the dashboard of the ancient Subaru, and drive around with a sense of blessing that is intimate and clear and which I very much want to share with the world.

Bumble bees drowsing the side yard lilac, reminiscent of Emily Dickinson poems, the reason we are all alive.