MUSE

― John Green, Paper Towns

  Ode to a Wild Child

How does it feel

To grab a struggling coyote by its haunches

And slam its bendy body against a tree?

What’ll I do when you actually tell me?

  It’s a strange question, but we know

These wide gecko eyes will imbibe every whiskered word.

It’s the reason the effortless us persists,

The reason the unshakeable we exists

  You couldn’t wait to lie

With me, when summer sun was setting.

Crossed a horizon for which we couldn’t atone

Our crafted masterpiece isn’t etched in wood but bone

  Sequestered banter and buried dens unearthed

Teaches an animal to dig new routes,

To dig and prod until we reached mock sun

Towards earth’s blazing core, we ran to run.

  Moon-soaked on turf, raised heads and howls

We lie, just for seconds, to impress the earth.

Your mane with evening grass entwines

With your smell of cedar, I suffice as pine

  Then winter came, replacing green with cold

Worlds unheeded sparked flirtations unneeded

And in your rummage for hot food and swift hopes

Huntsman caught your hind foot in blistering ropes

  Your drive to abandon this “land of lost dreams”

Is thwarted now by the bond on your ankle.

One latched when you threw logic windward-side,

Prophesying prison spanning continental divide

  With fang and fight you tried to loosen your trap, yet

In confusion and haste, you bit at me instead 

I lay on hoarfrost and swore this cold I could outlast

But present must look to future; we recede as past

  Migratory season is still coming though, soon,

And you’re still a part of that flighty flock.

Impermanence, seasonal memories, slow-winged hum

Our fingers have worked so well sans opposable thumb

  Even now, wildness is undisturbed by regret

And significant nothings surpass borders still

We are the bullet tunas not needing functional gills,

The plain lions that thrive lives without kills

  So what’ll I say without you around

Will my words mean, will my clever be quippy

Whose mongrel pelt can stretch the length of yours

To stagger my days into ours n’ hours.

  With craving bred into your veins,

You’ll never have nowhere to go

Lost in a life of “ceaseless changes and forgotten futures”

Sinew will forever shatter your huntsmen’s sutures

  So toss leveret to sky,

Hound for fight and hone honed tooth

Ascend highest alp, waylay in dune

"Kenney's"

"Vincent Allen, Sr."