Thrum

In the Umwelt haze under flippant skies clade toads.
Each toad throat boils its separate air.

Conclaved, hull down.  Enumerated thoughts step
with ratchet, an eye for each, and how lingers the sharp
static of mind.

Do bees lift their bodies humbly, or with each stroke
swell and pose over mirror-ponds, the little narcissists?

Swift and tumble are handles to grasp the flutter and hum
of the unbound, but they blush too much, and cannot recover,
quite, the innocence of wingstroke and plummet.

Do feathers know their names? Does each retrice or remex
proudly indulge its baroque nomen, or do they go by nicknames,
handles, and sundry aliases?

Ground cover primps and postures, brushes out leaf, and branches
each clandestine root.  Fathoms unlayered, admixed? or origami-ed
perhaps? Perhaps some deep structure struck together by each
separate environ, each un-clade, each fold massaged to blade, its
intricacies belying one gestalt.

Unsurance

The hands are wired for sound, and they ring out.

Do not remember falling, or even the colour of late sky in
doppler shift.  Do not remember the crisp overlay to late
autumn damp, or how water takes its edge in the
eager winter.  Do not.

Or perhaps powered by pistons to thrust in stunted reach,
to huff steam and pop, to slide back in oiled susurrus.
A robot shanty:
      spoke, unspoke, spun, unspun, ring rust whisper sing.

Do not remember mechanics.  Do not conjure a voice coil.
Remember instead the word and its alternating current origin;
try to remember falling, but fail.

One hundred drums, and each wire twitching in time;
one hundred lungs emptied and, with wind, sluiced, made paste,
slung away, vacuum fistuled, crunched into a single
red red blood cell hurdling memories strewn in sleep and
waking.

They are hungry from sleep, and there stiffens a coil, like
copper, greening according to its proper rhythm.  They are
roiling in hunger and cannot be bothered to remember, and
the hands come loose and spasm about looking for food and
forgetting each song but the robot shanty. Susurr, succor, sting.