For my good friends of many years, a poem that commemorated the first (or was it the 2nd?) OWmeet back in … I don’t know, a billion years ago or something:

meeting

the earth has poured her bounty on my head
the way one pours chocolate over northern wastes
melted into bowls, but this tastes
like abundance, like antique food ridden overripe, like
shit. we’ve squeezed the world, the blue tomato,
and gotten guts and pulp but not near as much seed,
not near as many vessels from which to burst.

still, what seeds there are have split with deep
fathom cracks, spitting life to cloud and pulse
back down to dirt with green laughter, with roots
that smash these daily jobs and houses, concrete
Twinkies and their sick prescription fillings.
when the few congregate there is fragrant growth,
there is a warm watering by zombies until dawn
that love us to sleep like beer and sunset.

so I raise a glass to next year, a delighting prospect
of dark amber floods and black soil warm
with friends that meet when the sun next rises.