Here's your natural cause.
Exposure, hunger, alcohol.
The flood rushes under the bridge
where some people liked to sleep.

They call it the shelter cough. What
they used to call the galloping
consumption. The causes continue to arrive
with yellowed skin and eye-whites, blur-tattoos.
All causes being chronic. Sparse
as causality is, possessing little but
sometimes carrying a neat
chess set. Or floss
that disdains rotten teeth
but sews a tear—borrow a needle?
Cause is so fucking contagious.
Rips in every fabric by its logic.

Cause is to lie down wherever it can in its
own stews, haunch to shoulder, elbow
to forehead, stink to stench where a voice is
a voice is a
voice only to itself and a deterrent to
the inexorable, the overweening, the cause better

than better than
meth, bread, cigarettes,
or booze. That for which there is no better.

The cause comes back always to sleep.
And that one, the complaint goes,
and bitterly, wakes in the middle of the night
laughing or crying, so's to wake everyone.

Natural causes hinge that way between night
and dawn where insomniacs are concerned. No one
knows the line between nature and cause.

Well.
I said chronic already.
Said woken up with one's pants yanked down around
one's ankles. Now that's nature.
Like blood from a broken lip.
Nothing's more natural than blood.

Nature's blow to the head makes
permanent alterations to the nature of nature.
You can taste its salt when it drips from
nostril to mouth. Nature's efficient transit.

For those who are addicted, abusing, obsessed
(Obsessed being admission as in:
Let me in,
I confess)
simply to say it, nature, nature, nature
leads back to itself as nature
redounds to cause.

Our hobo unpacks the chess set, loses a pawn.
Begs a free ride from the bus driver on a cold night.

You don't say "homeless" to describe nature, the
euphemism is "unhoused." Or

maybe "unhoused" is just the more apt
term for traveler who is rigid

with honor, can't back down from a fight.
That's right. Nature's a traveler without cause.

Its dictionary defines it with weather.
Both kin and utterly unrelated.

Finally serious when it stops shaking the body,
nature promises to accept itself, ever colder at its core,

as weather. It wakes
in the dark, intent on sleep.