Floating upon my pond this day, from the oak above is a leaf.
One who’s skin is still alive with green and filled out and firm
but who’s nourishing veins have the inflammations of the fall
not glittering like an emerald, but dull as dirt, sulphur and iron.

Frigid in its ‘ridged mortis’ state, adrift in the reflective wash
I reached over to fish out the lost life and to clean my aquatic pane.
I see a negative of me, myself, and I: pail, shaven, and sharply cut,
as a snap-shot maturing, though still in an undeveloped state.

The calendar publicizes, “August,” but it is September too.
I unintentionally deconstruct the flesh of green above,
that still warms my eyes and cools my body,
remembering the deceased skeletal silhouette that does neither.

Why is my outside color not that of the lively inside of bark
or my face not in dense evolutionary growth and wild?
Why am I pruned to fit in someone elses hothouse
rather than in natural settings feeding directly upon the sun?

When I touched the buoyant unattached page of summer
who’s soul is now attached to the golden fields in Hades realm
I am nibbled at by the aggressive mouth of my goldfish
who is asking to receive that which it perceives I am giving.

In September and with some fortune far after October too
I pray to grow in an arboreal universe of my own design
for magazine readers to read perhaps, rather than read by me
where I am photographed as brown, leafed and in a organic state.