Cuckoo Flowers and Dandelions

Robert Ronnow
The Ever Maddening Mandala

Cuckoo Flowers and Dandelions

Access to external inputs
and the ordinary care of Providence.
Tighten with a tourniquet, cut with a knife.
No unknowns. Fingerprinted in Pittsburgh.

I get why
people self-medicate. But should I?
Why is this black bear here with me
instead of up there on the mountain.

The care workers take in taking time
to do the job right
and the mistakes they safely make.
What’s not to like?

This election is a rational adjustment of life to life—
our brand of Amen.
How your head and dust to dust
is but a dream, that’s what they mean by irony.

How will it end
as cadavers or friends?
Buddhist precepts, fundamental physics,
never have I understood life’s meaning.

Believe, or else. I want the truth and death and worth,
a high degree of biodiversity, centuries of cultural and genetic evolution,
successful adaptations to difficult environments.
The possible which is more attractive than the probable.

The universal key
Given Him By His Prince.
Everybody has their own quirks, quarks, cracks.
The pure contralto and jazz solo.

When Russia joins the EU
and Congressional districts reflect contiguous communities
and we can rank our preferences when we vote
then history will have ended.

How many real worlds are there?
Forklifts and what am I missing?
The observant, wise man has only to wait.
Absent until too late.

I’m bored with the national debate,
the opposite of witnessing the universe’s birth.
But when I look in the mirror I see who would want to marry that?
It’s a work of art, natural as sex.

Not that I am able
to not be cold in winter.
Without being seen, without being saved
solitude has been a blessing without seeming so at the time.

All I know is sun,
hesitating and hurrying
without a consciousness to behold it.
The ever maddening mandala.

FOE, refused, unknown, deceased, please desist.
Drowned in dust and indifference.
Flee the capital. On the spectrum.
The nameless one.

I passed the Sixth Avenue basketball courts
where players show off their testosterone-induced talents
and bought a Charlie Parker side, for cheap.
Without measure life is good, or will be good.

What can I say to ease your way, and mine
and bigger than death.
All stories end but the endings cannot.
I like not knowing other people’s thoughts.

I want to hold back the Spring. Why?
Because I never want to die.
Sorry, you cannot grant to that grantee.
You can return without being seen.

Trees in every direction in the wrong key,
the passage of time at the mercy of eternity.
Winter and the cold that keeps us sane and sober,
the beautiful black and white photography,

and the extra weekend of not knowing.
If we expect the future to be better than the present,
moonrise over Bronx,
cuckoo flowers and dandelions.