16 Hours Before The Surprise Death

After dropping rhymes like nickel bags all over the neighborhood, 16 distinct trees grow in a big circle around the house. It's hard to remember a time before they stood full size and the question of were they ever saplings is, every time, superseded by the question of were you ever young? Thick sap wastes itself on bugs and birds and the pancakes inside the house go naked. Piney green herb aroma floats up in an illegal cloud but the law of man can't reach here, except for one, except for the ones that insist upon themselves even without handcuffs, without cells, without solitary confinement and cruel and unusual torture, without the benefit to the town that the prison brings, without the largely underground hypermodern facility above which new parks and playgrounds can be built, without the sodium pentathol, the electric chair, the thumbscrews, the death of man, the my house now, the sound and the fury, the dancing lights, the will o' th' wisps, the will of the people, the wills of the masons, the secrets of NYMH, the NYC transit hub, the garden, the guard who always lies, the guard who never lies, the column of hands that talk and see and lift and drop, the crystal balls that are part glam, part magic, part illusion, that explode into horrible drills that kidnap babies that take too much for granted that are in danger; horrible danger; that do not know what the high line is but curate the high line festival that are impressed by new zealand folk comedy singing that is way more serious than it seems but isn't saving anyone's life today; by this, by that, by this and that; by and by; by and by; by and by the trees turn brown and yellow and shed all over the ground and the weeds grow up and are hard to tell apart except that the weeds don't come out of the ground as easily as the flowers, and the weed turns brown and dries out and a lot of it ends up getting wasted, and the willows still don't understand why everyone thinks they're depressed all the time when they're just trying to provide shelter, and the woodpeckers fly south and are annoying, and the penguins fly north and are extinct, and the dodos run in circles and perform great feats of calculus, and the dinosaurs evolve into birds and are much less beautiful and sing much less sweetly and are much smaller and are much stupider and are still warm blooded and at least they can fly now, that's something.

Little puffs of herbal smoke come up from the chimney, each one the exorcism of an unintended consequence, a repression, and tomorrow.