Boys Nwt

This poem is part of a series where I go on at short length about logging in the Pacific North West, even involving some aficionados of the Civil Rights Movement. I also talk about parenting and diverse other subjects, as I like to write about a wide variety of topics, fictive and non fictive. Please read and enjoy.

In order to keep following the dictates of your sacred

Working souls in chaos order - keeps the money flow

Through credit banks - and it must go ever forward

As concentration camps are history not always aborted,

The Northwest Territories are new, strange raw lands.

I shake - reflect upon what this - aging peccary thus demands.

I saw someone go up there with fourteen giant rusty chainsaws,

People who take down trees through inebriation of concentration,

And you know, if I could be up above, that is exactly what I'd do.

Logging, logging, and eating food in an unearthly paradise of

Green distraction, constantly chanting, Move Forward, and Cut.

As timber falls down, we hear silver wolves howling on the Horizon,

There is a fallen once snowy mountain, and Dear God, there is it,

The mountains with snow aplenty waiting to be climbed and loved,

By overgrown boys who need pay and work and some few girls,

Driving trucks and taking all the work out from the Mexicans

Who need to be driving oh gosh they're already up there, spewing

Coffee from brown hands and curling around the fingers of time.

I can't do all forms of work, as no one else ever can, too, and I

Still long for the Life of Reilly - camping around the trees line!

There is no more beautiful smell for an instant than Evergreen,

A smell worth the blades runs of crashing timber faster than I;

Keep up with the men and boys and women, and log down dust.

But now I can only craft the ripe fruits of poetry, sap and rust.