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Weird Life


by Darryl Price


A modest looking riverbank is a 
tension laid trap. A modest looking mouse 
is almost always a red herring. A 
modest owl is a perfect lie. Exposed 
roots are telling you something important 
about everything far away; also 
something very near and dear to you. But 
you only want to hear the narrative 
you are most comfortable with. That way 
you can stay in your proud canoe, pretend 
the mountains are just mountains. The clouds are 
just clouds. You're not surrounded by any 

weird life, but only by the softly chosen 
carbonated silence of your own head. 
The river rocks have heard some stranger and 
wilder things than you could only ever 
half dream of, hidden in moonbeams, perhaps, 
or storms and raging winds, but you pretend 
they are only jagged little stones, stuck 
in the same mud for centuries. It's the 
easiest way to remove their fossil 
brains from modern discovery, if they 
have any, which might feel and think something 
completely different, and unknown to 

you and me. You are being felt as a 
passing pressure and a quick musical 
presence by crowds of communal trees, and 
lumbering through the leaves and sticks, small warm 
animals, many miles away.  It goes 
without saying that all birds are keeping 
a watchful eye on you. There are things in 
the grasses that right now have formed and stored 
a memory of you, the vibration 
of you coming along inside their day. 
So float on, it's what you do best. But you
could do more. Welcome to celebration.
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