Gift for the Darkness

Representation in wood, the chieftain’s painted guise
covers an ancient oak,
or pre-disease riddled elm.
The shell exists to inform, to show and document the past,
while speaking volumes toward our legacy of death.

Some will see the wooden savage, carved and ready to occupy a museum,
or smoke shop entrance.

Others will find discrepancy between a modern world,
its cars and sidewalks, and the old and superior way of life.

But from this plastic chair, I’m only reminded
of our obsession with the dead things,
that we exist in a country of ghosts,
dead wood, carved to fit our fancy,
and metal cages that burn our earth from the inside,
a horrible black-blood transfusion.

People pass through the frame, blind to the casualties that surround them,
desensitized to the graveyard society we’ve created,
shuffling and bemoaning a world that we don’t
hold in sway,
that we haven’t yet bent to our control. While everywhere, our trophies scream their finite silence.