Oil

It is disconcerting

to feel brilliant

when so many mad persons

appear to view themselves

in much the same way.

The schizophrenic with a sailboat fetish

the brunette with gashes on her wrists

the balding man with a love

for French existentialists.

Certain ideas perish

after reading books,

slim like prayers,

that tell the truth about doves

and the hidden cost of smiling

at the dawn.

When simple solutions

are proposed,

their appeal is palpable.

The offering of trite absolutions

often hums in the fibers of being

with a special resonance.

Everything beautiful

about the ocean

is also repugnant.

Mostly people only enjoy it

because it is not utterly

stained

with our blood.

It has instead a more relentless

decay,

the gift of a very old forest

as it turns the salt to water

and then back again.

Olive trees live two thousand years

and write so few poems.

By our typical thievery,

whereby we squeeze all

the life

and increase

from a land that time has turned

to desert,

we can understand

those gnarled trunks

and their tide-slow dance,

and the way that it feels

to be a genuine structure

in time and space;

to inflict the stricture of scripture

and re-imagine modern horrors

as near-eternal absurdities.