There is no insight waiting
at the edge of perception
only the failure to hear birdsong
intensely enough, or look at trees
so they stay fucking looked at.
Until we are properly dead
no moment can be inhabited.
Instead, we are always glancing
sideways
at the so-called natural.
And even when we get a solo wood,
and rainfall keeping away all
but Tarkovsky’s ghost,
we find only an inadequate self.
Even the botanist, the leaf-knower,
would see little beyond floating labels –
an anticipation of info-glasses,
Dwell, you fucker, dwell.
Move into some faux hermitage
and stick your eyes deep in moss
for two decades. Then you might begin
to be less green.
Instead, tourist, you are ignorant,
unsated, levitating. You might as well
be the pilot of a jet, carving
air-valleys out of rock-valleys
from here to your usual canteen.
I imagine me for a moment made of leaves.
I imagine the forest telling itself
it is only a wood,
so as not to terrify me; my left
hand is being digested in the
stomach of a wolf;
my right hand climbs a pine until
it tops knowledge; most
of the rest of me has been
disembowelled by a serial killer,
the one who brought me here in the
guise of a fictional character.
A squirrel and another squirrel roll
my still-seeing eyeballs –
the sky, dirt, the sky, dirt.
Let us decompose – it is the just
thing to do,
returning Pot Noodles and Dr Pepper
to the earth from whence.