A Poinsettia
is not actually poison for the dog
with the bicycle wheels
harnessed to its back hips.
The fractal diadems of the spruce keep
pressing upward.
Winter with its one glass eye says,
Computing isn’t fun,
but it could have been.
The structure of the command
is the command.
A good dog is a computer
with a soul. The code poets keep
mistaking form for function
while their ideograms
rest in the certitude of denotation.
The purveyor of this stuff
thinks he carries news
of the future on his hip,
but it’s just the plastic casing
of a retractable leash.
Winter with its one glass eye
says, Conjunctions are prosthetic
joints for quadrupeds.
I’m not after anything real,
so spare me the blood harmonies
and demotic outfits.
The tree in flurries is a live green tree.
The sonation of the mourning
dove flying from the live
green tree a mechanical
function, not an expression.
They counted to three
in a patrilineal progression
the day before I came.
Back there at the root
a smiling butcher slaps fat
and slugs cheap Canadian whiskey.
The weather goes on leaving
digital memorials to itself—
dense green Doppler echoes,
ominous hook echoes—
that tell us we were passed over
neither for a lack of love
nor its surfeit.
Cal Freeman is the author of the book Fight Songs. His writing has appeared in many journals including Southword, The Moth, Passages North, The Journal, Hippocampus, Southwest Review, Post Road, and The Poetry Review. His poetry collection, Poolside at the Dearborn Inn, is forthcoming from R & R Press in 2022. He currently serves as music editor of The Museum of Americana and teaches at Oakland University.