POETRY BY JACK DEAL

I.

The rosemary shrub choir;

a bittersweet song meant for couples on their silly walks. Hear it with the lungs. Hear it like the midday sun.

The dogged summershine climbed; oh, those ancient rays; fierce, like how our parents tried to raise us.

Don’t they know that solace hides in April showers?

We prayed for unfaltering rainclouds and lazy petrichor mornings. The irony.

II.

Instructions on how to die:

Become a dogwood.

Avoid becoming a pine or conifer.

Pines, conifers, and other evergreens will live forever. You do not want to live forever.

Or do you?

If you become a pine or conifer, you will bear witness to the fall of humanity, and nobody wants that.

 III.

Count danish days like sweet calories, like coffee cups. Iced or otherwise, let every drop override senselessness; a programmable beverage. Do this. Do that.

Make young hearts skip beats, give those kids panic attacks. Give them perfect pastries to chase their black liquors.

Elixirs like god nectar, sugary vanilla pitchers drip drip drip

like honey into a hexagonal temple. Twice a day or more.

 IV.

Crooked pavement stories reminiscent of popsicle afternoons. Gravel becomes cement, or asphalt.

The bricks are the prettiest; individuality divine.

Whose names do the brick roads bear? Oh, to be immortalized beneath the wheels of Fords and Toyotas, and fucking Teslas. Like roadkill.

The sidewalk is more romantic anyway. Pedestrian daydreams, like handholding lanes made for soft-hearted folks.

 V.

Pass through the park, if you dare.

The turtles crave your company—if you can believe it. They’ll wait for you in the shallows or upon little logs that rotate slowly, like dancers in the pond water.

Look for the geese, for they are wise and well-traveled.

They will show you which paths not to take to get back to your hot car.

If you’re lucky, they may even call you by your name.

 VI.

Hot tar and gasoline, like ambergris;

jet black avenues to surpass Rome and Constantinople. And the ancestors chose Ford over the Green Man.

At least empires build sturdy roads.

Handholding ceremonies and dizzy downtown walks

may alleviate the madness, if not for a little while. Oh, ancestors. Thank you for the forever roads.

Beyond the age of oil, they will make fine footpaths.

VII

Take me on a skate date. We’ll go in the dead of night and only the cops and the frogs will notice us.

They’ll watch us laugh and skin our knees on the pavement.

And they’ll croak at us when we kiss

beneath silvery streetlights and a blanket of moonbeams. Let’s go when the air is cold and the wind is dead.

I want to be shivering when you lean into me; arms and lips and longboards.

 VIII

Soldier ants find corpses quicker than humans do.

The great moth, having fallen in the night lies still, its wings already severed, its body disemboweled.

On the sidewalk, it will remain until it is no more. Curious humans may take notice. They may point or inspect but they’ll leave the moth well alone. It is a symbol.

A reminder of death. And so the humans enjoy their walk because they know the ants will someday come for them too.