Someday

Someday

No plot for this body when I die,
no pine needles puncturing my back,
no false fir lullabies of the wind.

I refuse to rest in golden valleys,
tune my ear to bird garble
that mistakes decay for music.

Moss is not a cradle.
Salt is not salvation.
Worms don’t bless.

I won’t become part of the “cycle.”
I’m not compost.
I’m the interruption.

Death in a ditch is not communion,
but the residue of conquest,
not a prayer to be whispered beneath moss.

Let the earth keep its aching metaphors,
its chlorophyll gospel of rebirth—
I am not soil’s second coming.

I am a man— a gentle man—
not clawed,  not carved, barely created—
not nature’s child— barely her vandal.

I live apart, separated, existing in the liminal
between man, beast and flower,
creating sapient poetry from the grief of worms.

I do not seek to infect what I nest,
seek to linger in voracious consumption,
rise above the wisdom that creates our decomposition

Sometimes I almost touch the soil—
when a hand brushes mine without warning,
and I forget the cost of wanting softness.

Like others I live in the mineral self,
but do not bow to a sunlit plot that offers
neither transcendence nor salvation.

Sure, my bones might splinter on concrete,
be swept into that vast landfill of icon, circuitry,
dissolve into anything but a leaf—

and if tomorrows bloom from me,
from the softening of salt, this sighing into moss,
this hungering of root and worm—

it will be from the beauty
of what I have done
and said.