Dry Woody Gothic

A front porch is made of machined components: a base in aggregate concrete, indiscernible teethy chunks clumped as if they were born together; dry lathed struts mechanically supporting a railing, each lethargically supporting a fractional load; the railing they hold a flaking splinters if only by sight; the support’s seniors with matching belts and waists holding a sagging roof too, gritting for decades. Take a step out here, then another, then down to the lowest to take a seat. Wasps have made nests in the door frame, their kind dosen’t sting. There is a little bird house hanging from a tree, the wasps have colonized there too. A woodpecker climbs to the top of a dead tree, its silhouette blends into that of the branches. Dead wood— tree carcus grown, put to work, ripped out of a retired pallet and put to work again, finally entering another round of circular time as a light fearing beetle forty feet in the air, and growing to a greater maturity in the splitting proteins of a strange bird.