The wild bows over homes and human houses
An embrace, or an entrance
To a foreign place
Rock face tilts
Like a shack on the brink of collapse
Defy the mountains as inverted hills
Defy the road
Defy what’s still
.
Candy-colored huts and hutches
Patched with rotting wood and old fishing line
Pandemic-ridden, but not yet quite alive
The Village of Death still presides
.
‘70s students fended kings and cranes
Built invisible fences to keep out the flames
So, the king built a damn
In front of the School of Architecture & Technology
Young men smash mallets into metal rods to grind
Cinderblocks on a highway median
.
A red light shines between two green arrows
To what extent does intuition guide how we are
How we live
To what extent does experience dictate the way we choose
Or don’t
Who cares?
.
Ghosts inhabit the space between badlands and goodlands
Only to live rigidly by someone else’s rules
The stick that beats the monarchy’s broken back
Churns the youth to dance
Barefoot, skipping between leach puddles on the jungle floor
Look up to see God through the translucent green
Of bamboo leaves
That snap under the weight of the overgrowth
Like the stick that breaks on brass spines
.
To what extent
To what extent would you defend the virgin jungle
As long as it’s beautiful
As long as the men with piggy bank brains keep driving
Along your flower-lined lane
.
Pluck skulls from streams that trickle
One-cent coins into the palms
Of Coca-Cola swindlers
And road-side chicken dinners
.
Plumes of smoke rise from flaming piles of trash
Ghosts of ancient beasts linger in the thick blue haze
They watch
Afraid
Not of being forgotten
But of us forgetting
The girl is a Starseed
They say
Like many of the spirit-seekers who went extinct
She doesn’t know how to pray
.
But it’s ok
No matter how violent a life
The end is always a quiet way
.
An admirable duty
To serve the spinning top
Known only by a girl’s finger
That strokes a fern
And everything stops
.
Until a logging truck that transports dead trees
Passes by
Art by Kėkė 