I MISS THE WOODS
It’s easy to worship the world
but hard to worship people.
Life should be like fight to a dog.
But all modern life consists of
is society,
learning how to negotiate society
how to deal with the pressure of other people.
The suffocation of too many rules,
too much forced equality
and the moral strong arm.
So many lives go by
without ever setting a foot
in the forest,
wilderness like a wormhole to sanity,
a corridor to the ancients,
a mainline to the heart and essential life
and what is beyond life.
Every problem society frantically tries to solve
is caused by society itself
and society can’t just
solve itself
except for one way,
and we don’t like to talk
(kaboom)
about that one.
DOWN AND NOT PROUD
I am beginning to understand how someone
could drive their car
over an animal
on purpose, as they’re driving down the blacktop
at night in their truck,
how they could rev the righteous
engine into a furry creature
just wandering out in the cold
dark beauty of the earth without
favor or expectation,
how seeing pure fear
in tiny confused eyes can make
one glad, hideous, how dumb
one is with the need
to feel superior
to something, to anything, to bend
a life to a
will
when one is weak
and alone
and no one is watching.
GATHERING
I don’t know if you know anything
about chickens,
but they lay a lot of eggs.
When I was a kid every morning we’d go out
gathering.
Some of the hens liked the coop
but if they set their tiny minds
on getting out they
will,
clipped wings or not.
Don’t worry, there were plenty
of eggs, it was Easter every
freakin' day.
Brown ones, white ones,
double yolks, some even had
embryos in them.
These were the ones that made
my sister barf.
After a while we just let the wilder
ones go,
truth is you just get
tired of them
and we couldn’t sell the eggs
because everybody around had their own
troubles.
Sometimes we ate
the chickens themselves, but we were too lazy
to pluck the feathers,
instead skinned the stringy critters
and ate a tough meat
without the best part.
We were all thin
and mean, squabbling
and kicking in
the dirt.
The roosters slept around us
in the trees
and always woke us up
in the middle
of a dream.
THE SPINS
Theresa gets tired of me trying to kiss her
so she throws my bicycle
into her El Camino and drops
my fifteen year old
drunk-on-rhubarb-wine ass
on the lip of a gully out
by New Fayetteville,
five miles from my mom’s,
middle of nowhere,
and pushes me away.
I fly down the gully's green throat
my hair straight back
like a high dive into the future
watery as blood
distorted and dizzy
and faster than summer
comes the one lane bridge
with the silver flash
of creek beneath it,
a red river springing
like a roar from my mouth
into its mirror image,
the giant seemingly endless
climb in front of me,
and one small quick fish
below
swimming in circles.
Mather Schneider is a 40 year old cab driver from Tucson, Arizona. He is happily married to a sexy Mexican woman. His poetry and prose have appeared in the small press since 1993. He has one full length book out by Interior Noise Press called Drought Resistant Strain and another full length coming in the spring of 2011 from New York Quarterly Press
