November 10: The Tree Where No Tree Needs to Be

 I heard the song in a dream,

like a vintage record on wax,

"Only a tree, where no tree needs to be..."

and it haunted my head with

the earworm-sense, the nonsense

atavism made me want

to find it on a record: where

was this tune?

But the tree is: "we",

the tree where no tree

needs to be is life as we know it,

here in the zone of things

evolutionarily possible

in the way we 

empirically know them. 

It doesn't have to be this way:

we where we are, but it is. 

And we are making this place a place

where we will not be,

butchering the tree by 

degrees, hacking off smaller limbs

then larger.

When are we

hacked off? 

Maybe in the stochastic flow of time,

the randomness of space,

there's no reason for this place

we call "Human Civ."

But we are a part of all the things,

the birds and bees and fish and trees

and I'd far rather we

all live.