Tree of Knowledge

Along this leaning tree overspreads a crooked arm,
wan with tired views
and news of reaching,
forlorn and telling,
assiduously bristled in barky intent and knowing.
It always meant to branch out
in a random shuffling of limbs
its mistakes of revelation –
no telling where they would lead.
But wakeful indecisiveness,
anchored by dreamy flight-blessed instinct,
curved momentarily in the enthusiasm
of what you always wanted to do –
too foolish and too tight-lipped to turn back.
Nothing smarts like a surprise landing of silky shame,
a tulle-wrapped and touted retreat –
tools of uneasy pursuit,
unfortunate to break wild,
but easily let go.
Purposeful ruin admits you in advance
by an imposition of fright,
amid claustrophobic rain clouds, dim and close –
full of second string droplets,
second-rate and stunted flights
of archangelic false starts
which shift in strangeness,
frozen in aggression,
and deception,
delineated in agreement
with unfounded intimacy.
You lead the army nowhere and for nothing;
wasted annihilation fraught vain and purposeless.
It’s the bittersweet bane of my existence,
a theoretic suicide mission,
embarked upon with only graceful apprehension of outcome,
and barely backhanded with a stinging slap of truth.
We are defeated and destined, predating descent.
The intent of ignobility slinks imperceptible until
upon the thrall,
awakened at the intersection of hope and folly,
intertwined hedged bets are belated by boredom,
straining unspoken all the previously-said,
rimmed with cliché
and veined with familiarity –
the different countries of countenance,
the wrong side of the tracks –
this tree is ceded in ruin,
early-seeded by eager heirs.