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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Garden of Eden, Kind of

It was empty save for brambles
and ferns.
Nothing grew, as I swallowed
tons of light
and wove shadows into rugs.
I put my fingers on the wall
and discovered the world pushed back.
But that was then,
and this is now.
The face card found a suit
in the deck.

A story began to tell itself.
Words sprouted on the barren ground
like weeds,
then flew in the air
and never planted themselves again.
Great flocks of them
talked and talked,
and wrote things here and there.

Letters to the world,
to strangers,
to the newspapers,
and finally,
in a journal
written in poetry
with many mutations
and misspellings.
Snd I was told by something,
or someone,
or in a book other than my own,
that in the beginning was the word,
and what followed was epilogue,
and religion, and politics.

Until now, I would prefer
an outback,
where I could walk forever
with kangaroos,
and never worry
that the world could fill it up.
Or what the world was saying,
except encounter a few people
who appeared magically
in the bush,
and we came to love one another,
and tell stories
under the vast blue
where everything dissolves
in the end.

Published inIndex of all Poems