Bear Claw

Worried down to the pad-locked gin closet of this soul of mine,

this soul, a shotgun marriage with the divine,

I wear on my sleeve the wind red look of having been

turned around in a big city in winter in this office I work in.

Shredded rope ,like the ends of my hair, from where my white-knuckled mind

tries to hold on - what is this Other Being, my employer,

 trying to tell me, looming bigger than god in reflection across the cubicle,

that hot-house nothing grows in.  I attempt one last bridging ,

to swing this Kodiak torso of mine into a body corporate. 

But the body corporate is the only body without a body,

the soul has nowhere to live when it’s there.

And sales managers can be such slippery fish

who can’t bear bears not from the circus,

I’m a wild one,   I haul down half forests of pine.

Hear all this honey dripping from my river mouth,

this wisdom swallowed with fish bodies?

I realise it’s in letting go that my hands are strongest,

all the salmon hop right into them when they’re open.

They’re not corporate climbers, these bear claws.

These digits of mine, not for counting.

They’re spelunkers of this early autumn breeze

and add only on an abacas of trees

all of this incalculable preciousness.

And what they create they don’t own.

So I quit and apply at a diner down the street that smells

like snap-frozen car freshener green

apples and cigarettes and dirt-under- the-finger-nails poems.

Do I have experience?

Well, no.

And yes.

Millenia.