SIPPING VACCINE

Sitting under a red and white striped democracy-umbrella
Soaking rays that shriveled African black into raisins, sipping
Three cups of available influenza vaccine, nodding
With streaming electronic quarter notes, and theorizing
About war insinuates I’m the only one walking softly
Holding a big stick, while forgetting how sticks are grown.

Sticks grow from scattered seed-forms, wrapped shelled
baby blankets along refugee trails, dropped rose-pink,
gypsy-yellow, and baby blue bundles crying, beckoning
devitalized parents of exhaustion back from footprinted
safety paths, not knowing errant bomb-cacophonies overpower
their weakening faultless screams.

Seeds force roots through their mother-soil, tendrils
Of stability and nourishment, stemming from Hut 21 toward
The fence and past guard station 3; eating excess dampened
Dirt, causing the runs down your left leg, pooling
Under the arc of your foot, squelching, like what you do
To your screams of patient madness, with every footstep.

Sprouting timidly in youthful exuberance, tubers grow
Heavenward, crowding train stations comforting mother’s
Tears, riding past rolling mountains into sulfur Hell
Pits, caressing a crucifix with knees pushed up against
A heaving chest, cramps pricking each calf like pointed
Tin forks and memories of warm, clean water.

Trees sprout their arms, strong branches claiming air, casting
Shadows of radiation in striated patterns across 14 times
100,000 slanted-eyed people sitting under a red flag dotted
With four yellow stars of safety, stackless smoke billowing
carless wheels past embroidered mirror shards, lying patterned
in death circles around burnt faces.

So I lean back, reading the newspaper’s humanity
Prophecing an ever increasing need for trees to suck
Greenhouses gases from friendly skies and sticks to reduce
crude costs per barrel. Somehow, my peace disgusts
itself, when trees are popping up in every climb, clouding
plasma screens two thousand miles away, out of earshot,
out of gunshot, and out of feeling, knowing theorizing
is damned next to the honor of those who know
pruning and growing of trees, while I sip today's vaccine.