how to grow leaves.

for the most heartfelt .

Yes, there are games that do not count and must be replayed. Let's call them groves, lento in the

forest (of all places). Blotches on your back. Clumps of hair that dribble down your leg as you shower

in the froth of Dove Body Wash and doom. Perhaps it's just the getting older in a world around me

of young werewolves. Perhaps not. And what i'm suggesting to you is how a poet becomes an

arborist. How the he-she's can dare stand before the green waterfalls; the largeness of all of

life's shunned proficiencies in their lycra leotards as the dancers and the acrobats and the

bystanders from the leprosarium stand close with lit candles and smoke.  I mean, if falling in love was

so easy, everyone would have done it at least once in their lives. "Taming The Texas Tycoon" and

"His Convenient Virgin Bride" are the two novels on my 84 year old mothers night stand. It's like

that morning that I couldn't find my glasses so I stumbled around for half a day in, what I thought,

were my brightly colored scales until the squirrel, who has seen me naked more than once and who

is my folklore, reveals the hiding place of all treasure, my glasses included. It's how a person, how a man,

how even a Black man grows leaves. First a chronic photosynthesis plunders your testicles. Then

you hold your breath under the trees of velvet and rich folk until you can either raise your arm

over your shoulders or plunge down into the earth. Then the sound of a saxophone is heard and not Parker

or Trane or any Stitt cavity, or the study of any spiritual being that comes to visit you. But your dead

daughter, or your father who drank himself in theory but voted and wrote poems and raised a family

in a house with silvery, slate shingles on it's sides. Or the women who turned plantlike and fabric

in their purity plus/or minus their symbolic sex, abundant as unprotected rain.

So one day you think that this pneumatology: this spiritual that fly's above the garden and winds up

in the house is the stull you write about/think about.. Ok then. So you punctuate it. Give to it periods and commas

like the lobes of a good shirt. Practice it's gasses, place the plump grinds above the stove; love it

even as it fevers. Dress it up in the doll-cloth of beautiful maidens or wealthy drag queens. Position

it in it's jewels and it's "Youth Dew" until the scent of it orbits the oil of your artificialness.

Pulperfyth it is, leaves are.

The marshal of the mangroves.

Eggs and meat.