Feeling flush, a man finds a pine cone in his bed. He wipes his face with his undershirt and feels the tackiness of pine sap smeared over it. His tongue is parched, and he feels the deep abrasions left by pine needles as he drinks a flat La Croix (tangerine flavored) left on his night stand. His passions have always been not vegetative but carboniferous. He fears a deeper illness as cold, crude runs down the back of his thigh. A night of passion is an eon of pressure without decay.

Proconsul spreads his flat rib cage and swings his arms in arcs. Exercising a few moments before scurrying along the limb of the great family tree, hoping not to crash off the branch and find himself in the dust with LUCA. He sees a gleaming fruit and clamors over branches, dead ends, and the forks where Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals graft back together reeking of simian love and exhaustion. He climbs looking for the red ennobling fruit that seems always just within reach. When he finally bites into the pomegranate, the cells are mostly empty. But nine good seeds lock his bone in mineral and his hopes aside. He must spend half his half-life clad in stone and bone waiting for Maxwell’s demon to open the great filter so that he might see glorious cities scattered on extrasolar worlds under the crystal shells of neutron stars.

Lion man in the umber of a cave
never reaches for Apollo’s soft hand
but holds in the concave of his
palm a tadpole

pale, blind and ready
to feed on sulfur rich excess
of Nyx’s gated garden.

Its liquid tongue brushes
against the velum and settles
in the lower jaw.

Twisting it into a pupa,
The tongue spends an age becoming a panther

ready to navigate into the Pythoness’s
forking caves past smoldering
cave bear skulls that mark
the navel of the world.