Tucked inside a hollowed out tree,

Enveloped by verdant twigs and trunk

and walls thick with deformed rings,

I press fateful head and calloused toes

to dirt padded by eons of solitude.

 

I am stuck in this hollowed out tree.

No visitors grace the forbidden garden.

No jailors haunt my sylvan prison.

I see the shade of the California Grizzly.

I see my beating heart, fibrous

and embossed like the towering redwood

Whom is both my complacent landlord

And my patient, stalwart gallows.

 

Illusions of timid hummingbirds,

Tweeting and tapping against their

Complicit, silver cages,

Fat-cheeked Chipmunks stuffed on pilfered acorns,

And treacherous geese, pearly feathers

Unstained by deceitful honking misunderstand

These untended grounds as shut to their merriment.

 

The bulbous roots of this giant stretch

From Singapore to Ann Arbor

Its withered canopy grasps hungrily

Toward the taunting sun.

This tree remembers a future warmed

By a star’s kiss of hope.

 

Life inside this hollowed out tree

Is unbearably bearable—

Like a restless, sleepless night

And I am an insomniac.

My hollow is a fruitless tree—

It is a grand joke, a comedy

My hollow is a cold and bitter soup

It is a drought, a forgotten home,

And a child swallowed by the sea.

It is a forest fire in Los Angeles.

It is a father’s suicide in San Francisco.

It is a young boy with leukemia—

Whose parents’ savings are less than zero—

My hollow is cosmic, and a grand joke.