Summer Haibun (original poem)

Summer begins when the snow sinks back into the earth and yanks me out by the roots first. Summer in the Green Mountain State relies on the blind obedience of its trees; they have no say in the changing of seasons. The sun beats our 1700s farmhouse into a pulp, gluing together the floorboards and squeezing me out. The naked hobos bathe at the swimming hole in the clearing where dogs wander off to scour for berries or beetles or bugs or Bambis not yet shot by the kids I went to high school with. I once again become subservient to the ruling class of Floridians whose lips inflate more and more each year until they pop and wash me away with them. A nuclear family begrudgingly allows their children to detach from their iPads and stab at the trees until I ooze out onto their pancakes. I’m a nuclear bomb. I never took physics in school, funny that now the babbling brooks and rustic farmer’s markets get to decide whether I am solid, liquid, or gas. Yesterday the creepy bartender at work told me weird sexual things about the dolphins at SeaWorld and I shriveled into a dried prune. Maybe now he’ll stop blending me into fruity frozen margaritas (half priced on Thursdays). Today I’m spilling and oozing over a plastic lawn chair, being sucked up by flies. I see my pedophile neighbor (convicted) riding up and down our road, shirtless, on his mower-tractor. Him and his wife have cut down all the trees in their lawn, maybe I’m next.

Unknown properties

Composition is in flux

Thousand year old tree.