I can’t sleep to forget this box I’m in.
I slide open the lid quietly
to witness these ants carry off the fattest death
as they march past on the slick floor each day.

There are skinnier deaths
waiting in your cell before the firing squad.

Ants march in single file
while prisoners walk the wrong way 
into history.

But who writes history and the traffic laws?

“No one can build a tree,”
says my 9-year-old daughter
as we’re sitting 
in the shade of a great oak. 

You can build a house
loftier than ambitions.
You can construct a theater
to screen the latest illusion.
You can raise a levee
to prevent greater indignation. 
You can assemble a regime
solely out of crooks.
You can make an asylum
to house a whole a society.
You can even create darkness
with invisible bricks and stones.

But you can’t build a tree.

A tree springs from its favorite soil.
A tree sheds its leaves according to seasons.
A tree may bear fruit or choose not to.
A tree will fast when the sun is too violent.
A tree will fall down honorably in the end.

No one can build a tree,
You can’t plant a person.

We are freedom’s chlorophyll!