My hands dirty
Your sun kissed face
We're dreaming of a world
Full of roses and gardens
If we knew we could bend reality
Through its own concrete maze
Swap blocks for bushes
I'd wrecking ball parking garage
And return South Austin
To the greenbelt wild
Critters look at me
From encyclopedia pages
And shake their rattled tails

It's not a rose garden yet
The raccoon brigade sneaks
By my window at night
To tell me
All I've done
Just destroyed
The foundation
Whatever was here
And the good good trash cans
I know I haven't built it yet
But I watched the movie
With baseball playing ghosts
I know what will come
If we plant the buttered corn
In our prairies
A garden doesn't happen
Overnight

I sculpt flowers
From my Play-Doh
To give them to you
I'd happily show
Anyone really
What a garden is like
When it's missing insides
The soul
The truth
That I can't grow a garden
With a bag full of words
Or rose-colored glasses
But imagine us
On the other side
We must imagine
Finding some place
Our place
To plant these seeds

Howling at the moon
As though some part of me was stuck up there
But now I am up close, dangerously close
Like Romulus called home
Creeping through suburbia, stalking its prey
The wolf knows I'm there, hidden and afraid
Despite the cover of the night

Losing the scent of its prey the wolf turns on me
I'm running through dark streets
Banging on cars, trying to wake the neighbors
Panting praying
But no one comes
It's all a blur — I don't remember how
But the nightmare ends, the wolf is gone
And I'm in a megastore like a Walmart
Searching for the aisle with all the guns
I get lost in the music department
Where I find a big wooden clarinet
With rich low tones
And a power greater
Than any bullet

I head out into the world
Ready to face the animal
To fight for my life
It's dark and quiet still
But Instead of wolves
I find a tribe of Minotaur-Centaurs
Making circles in a parking garage
Dancing claymation movements
Clapping new rhythms with horse-body hooves
And I find a world tearing apart
Their spell cast and there's nothing
I can do but run
The earth collapses between my feet
Crumbles
But my toes stay connected to the grass
Stretching and chasing the falling soil
My body floating up above
With my clarinet in hand