The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker
A Worm's Worth of Rabbit Holes

Some beings embrace the steady flow
of changing weather as it erodes 
their aspirations into broken vessels,
perhaps gracefully repaired and admired

Others debate the zeitgeistian milieu
with sharpened points twisted to
a thunderous applause as they glue
maraconi to their paper tiger crowns

Still others hoard amulets carefully
tossing salt across worried shoulders
never looking up or down just through
the sliver of folded hands muttering

So how then shall we catalog those
underdwellers who dine on thought corpses
and with belly full gleefully leap down 
the mouths of digger dwellings burrowing
with an insatiable curiosity from hollow
to hallowed hearth soon to venture
forth into the soil blizzard once more
caught in the dampness of lower humus 
ever ready to suckle from mycelial mana
the resonance of passionately wandering
untethered and omnidirectional caught in
misunderstood gravities without proper
identification or any retained receipt
good for one honorable legacy or passage
to a cloud stadium seat to watch the
significant pontificate in eulogies

Far from a hermitous life, one quickly
learns the salutes shared with passing
kin as they frolic amidst the sediments
and castings of lumbering ever-gorged
land whales and their timidly skittish
fur babies who never seem to dig far 
enough to escape their leashed comforts
for far beneath their callous gazes
terranauts gaze upon wonders of unburiable
treasures unhindered and with an affection 
for rusty sunsets of dissolution and
the bliss of cavorting through no longer
needed eye sockets and empty cranial 
caverns trading grievances for conundrums
soaked in the awe of cascading down chasms
of almost understanding and the afterbloom
of cherished questions gathered into posies
soon to drop like dusty naked vectors
revealing the blasphemy of vermiculture
and launching the hobo-hearted back into
the silt ocean of fallen stars cooling.
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