📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00324 ◊ "Thinking" out loud ◊ Bob Hicok
”Thinking” out loud
There are people who want to remove plants
they call invasive, as if nature craves a pedigree,
and people who want to remove people they call invasive,
who prefer faces in cottony shades, but the woods I know
accept whatever seeds blow their way, and New York
looks and sounds like the world, and if anything
deserves to be a snob, to suggest who or what
needs to be excluded, it’s nothing, since nothing
was here first and has dibs on the universe. Then God said,
Let there be light, and then the big bang said,
I am the light. I dunno, I wasn’t there, but it’s something
to wrestle with, isn’t it, that we’re children of zero,
of zilch. Kind of makes you humble.
Kind of makes you want to scooch over
and make room for the next moose or loosestrife
or rose of Sharon, the next Muhammad who’s tired
and needs to take a load off, get a job,
send money home to children he hasn’t seen
in a year. The democracy of life
is that plants and people thrive
wherever rain and sun grant root, until death
dismantles our rise and shine into usefully
equal bits. Existence is a slob, full of mess
and clutter, wonder and wander, and the one thing
I’m purely against is a purist of any stripe
or feather. I know: so what if a poet’s upset.
But I’m also a flautist, a plumber, a starer at stars,
washer of cars, a befuddled and muddled example
of human consciousness, that weird weed
that’s taxed the world more than added to it,
in my mumble opinion. If anyone has to go,
it’s only everyone you are, or could be, or know.
—Bob Hicok
—found in Southern Review (Spring 2023; Vol. 59, No. 2)