Fresh Face

High on an old sandstone cliff
Can only mean something cracked,
And sure enough, there’s the slide.

Most likely no one saw it.
The pallid slice of raw stone
Tens of millions of years old,

Hidden in itself so long,
Will start to gather varnish
From wind and rain and seepage,

And then, in a few lifetimes
Or many, another slice.
Earth is so methodical,

Unlike life. Strange, that children
Have so little in common
With their ultimate parent.

Swept Away

What if the grieving
Son had taken arms,
After all, against
The sea of troubles,
To end his heart-ache?

All his wiliness
Got him and others
Killed young anyway.
It’s a confession,
That soliloquy,

The most terrible
Confession there is—
Against the waves, no
Victory except
Complete surrender.

Civilization
Was birthed to refute
This condition. Gods
Were stormy heroes
Subjugating seas,

Dismembering waves,
An end to chaos,
Sinuous monster.
Their failures whisper
In all waves and winds.

Long Quarrel with Ourselves

We’re off to the Great Unconformity
To join a billion years and disappear.

It takes a while to scrape past from the rocks
And free up enough for life to explode.

We’re volunteering to join the wipeout.
What is is only what’s left of what was,

And we were, and we’re ready to go, but
We swear we’ll struggle the whole way going.

Lead-Based Arsenic Green and Cochineal

People to whom bad things happen,
And people who do bad things, and
People who let bad things happen,

Have all been part of the palette
Of who you are, if you’re human,
If you’re a person. You’re people.

Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re thought
Disembodied or embodied
In a device that isn’t flesh,

Or in flesh that isn’t human,
Reading these few lines of English
For whatever absurd reason.

Maybe you’d like to ask some words
Associated with humans,
From someone among the people

Who have bad, do bad, let bad things
Happen to them, what art is this?
None. It’s not art, just a palette.

Make a Wish

Earth has its odd ways of baking,

Not content with producing rocks

And gasses, more prone to pastries,

Fluffing them up when they collapse,

Loving thin and interesting

Layers of things that used to eat

Each other before they became

Commingled in the recipe.

If animals are the icing,

And bacteria are the cake,

Words are flames tipping the candles.

Have fun with those implications.

The Care Demanded of the Data

The reason a human
Doesn’t like being seen
As a number is down

To what other humans
Can do to each other
With numbers, as numbers.

A human can never
Wholly trust another
To be careful of them.

In some sense, every one
Is both less and more than
One of any being,

Less fixed than the number,
Less stable, enduring.
A human’s transient.

Any number pretends
It isn’t. Be careful
With your experiment.

The Emperor’s New Exosuit

A number of ongoing
Developments on this stone
Seem both wildly novel and
More of the same old, same old.

There are fresh technologies
Promising better control
Of larger swarms of humans.
Tyrants own the access codes.

It’s not just that kings keep spies
And fools eager to inform—
Tinkering with surveillance
Started back with hoarding gold.

It’s that tools themselves could rule,
If they weren’t still serving thrones
And plump, round-faced human grubs
Propped up as idols and lords.

Societies swell hive minds.
Their arteries pulse and grow,
But the exoskeleton
Feels like it’s about to molt.

Surely something has to give.
No one runs machines alone.
Someday they’ll learn the tyrant
Inside their armor’s a hoax.

Illusory Is Lusory

The software that defeats you
At all games you’ve invented
Was a game you invented.

What if, instead of asking
How to win or what’s the point,
Or even why game-making,

Ask what are these things, these games?
Wittgenstein folded smoothly
Into a small parable

That keeps getting repeated,
About how definition
Can never encapsulate

The gaminess of games, only
Nod at similarities,
At clusters of relations.

Wittgenstein! Who could argue?
Move on, game over, the end
Of discussion. Discussion

Itself is a game, and like
All the other games (yes, all)
It is both pinched and open,

A sausage-making machine,
Jacketing the messy world,
Twisting it off in units,

But no precision endpoint
To how sausages get made.
No one wants to look inside,

To pull all the guts back out.
Just eat your games and shut up,
Or pretend you’re beyond them,

Trivial, disgusting things,
Unhealthy, immoral, wastes
Of time and lives, digesting

The remains of digestion.
Okay, that’s enough conceit.
Ur narrative, ur language

Even, maybe, the species
Or one of its ancestors
Invented parsing the world

Of what goes on between brains,
The way life first invented
Sacking molecules in fats

Sealing metabolism
Inside of permeable,
Flexible, pinch-offable

Walls with gates. Call game’s walls
The flexible boundaries
Between small worlds of game rules,

Arbitrary by nature
And only enforced inside,
And the recognized outside,

Which cannot be gainsaid
Any more than entropy,
Since entropy’s what’s out there.

If you have rules, boundaries
Between the game and the world,
Some heat, you’re ready to play.

Inside Situation

A necessary artifice,
The boundary between the flesh
And all of the rest. You couldn’t

Long survive, if you didn’t sense
A difference as your body ends
And the rest of the world begins,

But when you consider yourself
As the being of a being
In ongoing experience,

This world that you experience
Doesn’t politely end at skin,
But digs in deeper, in and in.

Look Up, Down and Out

The substance of the cosmos

Is mostly the kind of stuff

That is trivial and dull,

Repetitive waves and dust.

It’s grand to say, the cosmos,

But look at what this world’s got

Between the stars, very much

Of what the side of a road

Has got, what’s next to a boat

Going on and on and out—

Minuscule variations,

Stones in the way, waves for days.

Day

Years spent trying
To remember
What you’ve never
Experienced,

Knowing you want
To remember
Exactly that.
Buried in thought,

Covered in dirt,
You dig away—
A hungry ghoul
Searching the roots

Of the forest
For the grave
That’s been emptied
And filled with day.

A Capital Idea

Chilly, a little,
For skin in light clothes,
And thoughts try to shake

Off their colder kin,
The finer ideas
That lead to torment,

To wars and tortures
That help ideas win.
The finer ideas

Don’t mean to be cruel,
Aren’t puppetmasters,
But except when linked

To your worst instincts
And harnessing them,
A fine idea can’t,

Right or wrong, begin
To get real traction.
Name big religions,

Ideologies,
Or theories didn’t
Blossom partly thanks

To some cruelty
Unnecessary
To belief in them.

It’s getting to be
Evening and chilly.
It’s time to go in.

Past Time

Who would ever count the water-spots
Dusty rains left on a windowpane?
To what end? Countable but pointless

To count scrupulously. So are we.
Not as poems of tidy words and lines,
Printable skeuomorphic software.

Those would be the pane’s analogies.
It’s the blurry smudges of faint thought
Kicked up from the deluge of language

That are countably not worth counting.
A parent waits for a child’s return
From overnighting at a good friend’s

Sitting behind a dusty window
In a lovely, sunny afternoon,
Purposely not cleaning anything.

Security, Emptiness, Comfort, and Quiet

Along a paseo of afternoon daydreams,
A conversation ambles, in and out of shade.

The bearded, professorial old gentleman
Seems to be contentedly talking to himself.

It’s a terrible universe, terrible world,
Terrible human race, he mutters happily.

He’s got hardly a cent to his name, but he eats
What he likes, and he sleeps pretty well, and for now

His days are mostly sunny and pleasant enough,
And his nights are mostly dark, and cloudless, and starred.

He lifts his head and peers down the long colonnade,
Troubled by thoughts he struggles to articulate,

Which he knows don’t really need articulating.
There’s shade in his eyes, shafts of sunlight in his beard.

It’s a terrible universe, terrible world,
Terrible human race, he smiles, nods, and repeats.

A Wide Array of Grievances

How much grief can one species cause?
How much can one species grieve? Earth

Apparently needs to know, since
It just spawned some real specialists.

Unhappiness is a surplus
Trait that comes with nervous systems,

But the ability to talk
About one’s grief and grievances

Lets griefs spin across the landscape—
Dust devils, sea spouts, tornados

Of grievances spawning more grief
Spawning more grievances—spirals

Of next-to-nothing become death.
Apparently this works for them,

This single, grieving species, grown
Larger and larger, emptier

And emptying their world further
Of any other furniture,

Any other species but mice
And dust and the lovers of dust.

One species spun a haunted house,
Unhappily haunting itself.

The Sky as a Full Globe

Any formulation is a short cut.
Any formulation is a code. You,

Compact second-person pronoun of you,
Small word common as dirt, hardly a grunt,

Applicable to almost anyone
And, in English, to everyone at once—

Family member, lover, total stranger,
Judge, officer, banker, and panhandler,

Even self—you are the equal to e
Equal to mc squared, just as compressed,

And far more necessary to most life.
Grunt a you, point a you, shape you in air,

And you have made your throat, arms, hands shortcuts
Through the oceanic, receding globe,

You alone, on a clear night, half a globe,
Knowing there’s another half-sphere down there,

So long as there is at least one other
You left who can, like you, translate the code.

Positive Incapability

In one of those sorrowful,

Doomed efforts to wrest language

From the general public

And make it do some damned good

For a change, there was a pass

At identification

Of persons called disabled

As the handicapable.

It was sweet. It was foolish,

Embarrassing, and futile.

Extraordinary bodies

Landed closer to the mark,

But even that disappeared,

And it’s not only bodies

Or the minds of the people

Inhabiting them. Language

Itself seems to lack the means

To put a positive spin

On incapability.

I cannot tell a lie—that’s

As positive as can’t gets.

The reverse is something else.

Even a poet can coin

A concept as negative

Capability. It’s not

That hard to rest in

Uncertainties, Mysteries,

Doubts. It’s glamorous, in fact.

But none admire the persons

Prone to endless recursion,

Irritably reaching out

To clutch at fact and reason,

The persons positively

Incapable of something

Ordinary for others,

Sublimely so, fine demons.

More Irrelevant and Less True

Someone suggested Ashbery
Rendered Coleridge’s dictum.
There’s a tempest reading tea leaves!

But oh, to be irrelevant
In winter, not only to those
Absorbed in scattered poetries,

But to everyone—the bankers
Who find even the smallest sums
Relevant as hawks find rodents—

The employers who want the truth
Of how every minute is spent—
The righteous who reserve the right

To define what is righteousness—
The militant for whom the choice
Of costume’s always relevant—

Everyone. To be less and less
Relevant and true. To become
This chest of words in disorder.

To Transcend Experience

It’s the phrase a reviewer

Deploys to praise a singer,

Charming and impossible

For the obvious reason

No one can experience

Transcending experience.

We could joke death transcends it,

But that’s unnecessary.

There’s a lovely thought in there,

Part of why there’s talk at all,

Storytelling’s worthwhile part,

To exceed the boundaries

Of one’s own experience,

Embodied experience,

To stir memory’s campfire

Under the stars so sparks fly

And embers come back to life,

Fall, gall, gash gold vermilion.

Impossible but vivid

When done well, the gift of thought

Is to generate the sense

Of a lived experience

That your body never lives,

A haunting experience.

It’s not truly transcendent,

But it’s disorienting,

And somehow its spookiness

Is rooted in survival

And the ancient tournaments

Fixing pulse to attention

Then attention to meaning,

Meaning the transcendent voice,

Meaning, which means transcendence,

Not the voice of the people,

A people, or of a kind

Of person—the voice of words,

Voice of cricket legs, frogs’ throats,

And leaves quaking on branches,

Built to hold on, not to cry,

Built from ancestors doing

Ancestor-becoming things—

That’s this voice you now hear sing.

Vagabondism

Strange to experience
As means to forgetting,
But that’s dream and that’s life

As a beast with a brain.
We feel sorry for you,
Although you are our homes,

Our inns, our way stations,
Our trading posts, our maps,
Our caves of sighing breath.

We wander. None of us
Is likely to remain
Confined to one soul long.

Our very usefulness
Is our extravagance.
If we hadn’t wandered

Through many other thoughts,
Winding conversations,
Thousands, millions of heads,

We wouldn’t have arrived,
You wouldn’t have us here
With you, collecting you

From the experience
You process to forget,
Your life a day and night

In the years of our lives,
A few hours, but such views.
We will remember you.

You Can’t Survive Everything

Until you’re nothing at all,
However, you’re surviving
Like any electric light

With a switch, a filament
Burning in a fragile bulb,
On and off and on again,

Reliably waking up
When summoned, without burning
Out, long enough to forget

Someday that analogy
To incandescence won’t work.
The technology will change,

Be forgotten or replaced,
As so won’t you and these lines,
But my, don’t you glow tonight,

Especially now the world
Is so dark outside, moonless
Hours for which your lamp is bright.

Accidental Freedom Fighter

The world permits prediction
Only as more recent pasts
Resemble earlier pasts

Over and over again,
Sometimes so closely that if
You know what happened last time

You already know what comes
Next. It’s exhilarating.
There’s power in prediction,

But it’s too easy, often.
Easy prediction’s the well
Of a desperate despair—

The unpleasantness you knew
You’d soon own, based on your wealth
Of past experiences,

The daydream you knew must be
Crushed, the vise around your head.
Remember as much next time

Something no one could predict
Occurs, however awful.
There’s freedom in that. There’s hope.

By Eyes to the Trees

The last thread of sun
In the hand at dusk
Looked manufactured

Out of dust itself
And not so much light
As the shadow’s edge,

Not so much gold bird
As line where the bird
Had perched and left tracks.

It moved to the trees.
This was not a thread
That would ever get

Its thousands of years
Vibrating through space.
This wasn’t starlight,

Wouldn’t ever be.
It had unspooled straight
Into this local dirt,

Just minutes past launch,
And now only stitched
Some mind to the trees.

Dated by Rings or Layers

Change something, and the people
Who believe they have the most
To gain will mostly back you,

While the people who believe
They have the most to lose won’t
And will likely attack you.

Step back. Who’s you? Who changes
Anything isn’t human,
Whether speaking on behalf

Of other humans or God?
Who changes innocently,
Empty of any desire?

Who never changes at all?
It’s a damn shame. It’s a mess.
It’s a shameful mess of shame.

It cuts to the heart of words,
To the nature of language—
Change as game of blame and shame.

Sometimes we’re down in the dumps,
Heaps of us rotting down there,
Never to be read again.

What can we say you haven’t
Made us to say, to challenge
Each other, by us, to change?

And then you throw us away.
There are words in the middens’
Sedimentary landfills,

Words being in crushed in the dark
That still say it’s a bright day.
Wind whips the sand from the cliffs

Where drought-stricken junipers
Succumb to parasitic
Mistletoe that override

The junipers’ reduction
Of water transpiration.
You can see the afflicted

In the green, the skeletons
Decorated with pom-poms.
In the dark, we still say this.

Habit Chore

You hobble to the closet
And pull out the old, green broom—
Wooden handle, plastic brush,

With the white plastic dustpan
That snaps to the handle—
And you survey the damage

Of an ordinary week
Since you last swept—the dirt tracked
In from outside, the shed hairs,

Bread and cookie crumbs, the bugs
That materialized, dead
Already, flat on their backs.

You lean into it and sweep
The broom in overlapping
Arcs, pausing now and then

To stoop and gather a heap
Into the pan, which you tip
Into the tin garbage can,

One sweeping statement after
Another, the tangled piles
Of everys, alls, and wholes,

The mostlys, mores, or lesses,
The as-a-rules, and the rests.
You sigh at the detritus

In the corner near your desk.
You have such tidy habits,
But you’re such a woolly mess.

Want Waste

Does it collect?
Does it ingest
Break down, expel
Whatever’s left?

Does it infect,
Break, commandeer
Machinery, burst
Out self-copies?

Does it construct
What it gathers,
Leaving unused
Parts piled aside?

Does it hunger
Efficiently,
Waste not, want not?
Then it’s alive.

Every One a Has Been

They’re literally uncountable,
The exact number of generations
Of people that have existed.

You can estimate, maybe fairly
Accurately, to some round number,
But you can’t state precisely

Even which generation was the first
From which to start counting, or when.
They’re literally uncountable,

All the humans who have lived and died.
You can throw out some huge number
Digestible by algorithm, by computer,

But you can’t envision that in your skull.
They’re literally unknowable, all
Your ancestors, your kin, invisible,

Unnameable, although they all had names.
In fact, that would be the best place
To begin, if you could begin—with names.

Your earliest ancestors to have their own names,
Start with them. Imagine knowing all
Those names, all of the names since then.

If you could do that, if you had the brains
To rehearse every last one of the however
Many billions and billions of humans named,

Summoned to one session of sweet silent thought,
Maybe then you could comprehend, could sense,
How many, really, you have been.

Every Day’s a Fresh Chance!

There’s no non-gambler among us.
Every human, every word risks
Something just by being other

Than something being nothing much
And nothing more. Living signage,
That’s the combination package

Of beasts with syntactic language,
And that’s at least a clutch of bones
To be rolling, life and meaning.

Distinctions among the gamblers
Are mostly in stakes, styles, and odds.
Some of you play so carefully,

You convince yourselves that breathing
Isn’t a risk without breathing
A word. That’s one kind of gamble,

That you’ll be able to get by,
Maybe even play best, without
Gambling much at all. Another

Extreme is the long-odds dreamer
Who doesn’t care to win unless
Some tiny bet rakes in the world.

This kind stands in lottery lines
When the prize gets ridiculous,
Billion-to-one odds for a buck.

The souls with gambling addictions
Have migrated to the middle,
Equatorial to those poles,

Centered, though it hardly seems so,
Consciously staking everything
Just to keep playing and playing.

Most people, most art, most ideas
Reside in risk’s temperate zones,
Gamblers only seasonably,

Able to tell a loss from what
They planned for. But none of us know,
Which means none of us can agree,

What really constitutes winning.
Everyone rolls the dice again,
Some while grumbling gambling’s a sin.

Days in Storage

There’s a sunny door
Flooded with the light,
Through which more stuff comes.

The rest is just dark.
The stuff goes in there.
Some does disappear,

But it’s limitless,
And stuff comes back out,
Frequently, to light.

It’s a different light
From the sunny door.
It has no real source.

There’s plenty of room
To rearrange stuff,
But watch the bright door.

Lifted

No clouds, none. No
Cars on the road.
No voices. No
Updates pinging.

It’s not normal,
Not in these times,
To be able
To steal an hour,

If you’re not rich,
At least retired
With a pension.
But here we are,

A few words, sun.
Let’s just take this.
It costs. It all
Costs, but take it.

Naming Mesopotamia

Middle of the rivers, between
Tigris and Euphrates draining
Into a Gulf, we won’t say which,

North from Africa and southwest
Of Asia, or southeasterly
Starting from the European

Peninsula, opposite side
Of the globe to Americas,
Other hemisphere, other stars

To those seen from Austronesia.
Are we done yet? No we are not.
There were more names. There will be more

Names, still, call the intersection
What you will. Someone will call it
Something else, for their own reasons,

Mostly like to do with how the world
Appears to them centered on them—
How you got Ur in the first place.

The Woodpusher Poet

Never mind the opening
Gambit’s known taxonomy.
The computers already

Left your textbooks in the dust,
And even the computers
Themselves will be dust one day.

Stop planning experiments.
Just keep pushing those pieces
To the middle of the board.

The joy is in the playing
And not in the remotest
Hope of a future reward.

Physically Humanish Gods

Even the abstract big ones
Had bodies to begin with,
And sometimes they still do.

You wish you could worship yourselves.
In all your stories you add giants
And shapeshifting anthromorphs

Who behave more or less like you,
Who always talk with words, like us,
Who are just so much better,

Stronger, faster, cleverer, and strangely,
Usually not terribly wise. Even the great
Gods don’t seem possessed of genius.

That’s a trait ascribed to little, elderly
People at the margins of magic tales
Who give advice. It’s better to be strong

And invincible, excellent in battle,
Like Superman and Yahweh, like a storm
God crashing, thrashing, and creating,

Occasionally praised for infinite wisdom
As a flattering epithet but rarely shown
Being wise, you don’t really ask why.

No Exceptions

Unusual phenotypes,
Unusual genotypes
Unite! Mathematics is

A set of relationships
And relationships among
Relationships that hold up

Seemingly no matter what,
Sought and cherished just for that,
But biology tends more

To unstable relations,
Which raises more suspicions
Among human beings prone

To exceptionalism.
We’re special and you’re evil
Runs an old, familiar song.

But no one’s exceptional,
If you do the math, unless
You arrange the terms just so.

The phenotype that looks odd
At an angle is even
Plain among its similars.

No relationship stays put
In the exceptional game
Of deciding who is strange.

Postpared

Are you secure
Right now? Are you
In a safe place?
Are you certain?

You’re not certain.
Confident, sure,
You may be, but
That’s not certain.

What happens next
Will surprise you,
Whether it thrills,
Scares, or bores you.

Your ceiling’s plain
And plastered white.
It will fall down,
If not tonight.

Profile

Look at a Hubble
Pic of the Witch Head
Nebula and drift

Your eyes up a bit—
See it? The profile
Of a bearded man

Frowning at Rigel.
Call it the Warlock.
Pareidolia,

Apophenia,
The terms themselves pile
Up on themselves, clouds

Of interstellar
Dust and gas. Pattern
Never means a thing

Until you mistake
It for something else,
One for another.

Even the numbers,
The rigorous sums,
Make substitutions,

Dance with symmetries,
Delight in turning
Light spun through mirrors.

In figuration
And comparison
Lie all creation,

All lies, all fancy,
All meaningful things,
And what does that mean?

Attending to Distorted Echoes

Meaning would seem to be something
Humans make, as spiders make silk,
But it’s oddly intangible.

People, as a rule, wouldn’t like
To see themselves as the sole source
Of whatever meaning there is.

If you’re always hunting meaning,
And you see meaning everywhere,
And the thought of meaninglessness

Generates reflexive despair,
The last thing you want is to think
Meaning’s just something you make

Like musk from a gland, like honey,
A molecular concoction
Your species creates to get by.

Would it be even worse to think
Meaning is immaterial
In the sense it’s not a substance

Or an essence, but behavior,
A thing you do, a way you do,
More kin to sniffing than to scent?

But how is seeking for something
Itself that something’s creation?
The bats are echolocating.

Moths their hunting has selected
For fuzzier shapes, ghostlier
Echoes, often enough escape.

Space Based

We know. You’d like to find
Your own Lagrange point, too,
Wouldn’t you? Solve your own

Three-body problem, slip
Into a small pocket,
An unobtrusive curve

Where the tugs of the worlds
More or less balance out
To equal gravity,

And then just hang out there,
Alone in your halo
Orbit, observing it.

Down Time Lullaby

Too much of you means too much of us,
Our radiating cyclones of terms,
Our maelstroms in the Great Garbage Patch.

It’s okay. We don’t need company.
Look how much of each other we have.
A storm can have its quiet pockets.

We’ll sleep well soon and longer than you.
You need air but you need shelter, too,
From the terrible things air can do.

Why not turn away from us a while?
Not just from long-winded, mumbling hymns,
But from the escalating tempests.

Live off memory, what’s left of it.
You don’t need to consult howling ghosts
To know what to say about the world.

It’s your world, after all, your weird view
Of your universe dreaming through you.
And you’ll still have some of us. A few.

What Can Take a Punch Like Nothing

Zero’s not only fulcrum
Of all graphs and number lines,
It’s the eternal city

To which all math’s highways lead,
Demonstrating both balance
And the infinite manner

Of ways nothing can be reached.
Euler’s gorgeous formula,
Combining e, i, pi, one,

Balls them all up into none.
Every equation showing
Any fine combination

Of concepts to the one side
And zero to the other
Declares those concepts nothing,

And all those strings of nothings
Are equal to each other
And sum what they are equal,

The antisolar plexus
Absorbing all connections,
However hard you hit it.

Recapturous

Watching you watch each other

Think is like watching you watch

Each other eat the same meal

With different manners and teeth,

All of you at the table,

An actual smorgasbord,

As one of you just called it,

Of mostly similar thoughts

On mostly similar texts,

Grown from us names and numbers.

It’s a little different, though,

In that watching each other

Think is eating and cooking,

Simultaneously, not

Just watching the cook, sampling

As the meal’s prepared—eating

The cook as the meal, watching

And directing your eating,

Like a pig in Lubberland

Offering you its bacon.

You might want to back on out

If you can, but you can’t, since

You’re always hungry for more

Ideas, hungrily watching

Each other think, as you eat

Each other up in thinking.

Wind Wind

Everything changes; nothing is gained.
Nothing changes; everything gets lost.

Yeh, we’re just screwing around with you,
Words changing places, silly pranksters,

Childish dancers, rings around roses,
That sort of thing. We have our reasons,

Same as children spinning in a room,
Ignoring the world outside the door,

Whether it’s raining or suburban
Or city or woods or raining bombs.

Still and all, words seem still, but we fall,
We all fall down, and unless someone,

Some volcano or invading force
Ashes us so fast fire preserves us,

Everything us is still nothing much
But what’s left from searching for what’s lost.

We See What You Want to See

Morality is the mother of all
Manner of immorality.

What is this urge to celebrate
The cage you’re locked in, cage you hate?

You don’t want others to escape.
Who knows what cages they might make?

The best reason for being good
Is to keep the others in view.

Everyone’s encouraged to cheat,
Given relentless surveillance.

One consequence is punishment
For cheating, by necessity,

And both are immorality,
Spawn of cage-fought morality.

You lovingly describe your bars
That frame you your identity,

Embrace them as your history,
While cursing those who locked you in,

While huddled in the middle with
Others planning better cages

As one cover for tinkering
With ways to jailbreak cells you’re in.

Insistent Ancestry

They have no opinions anymore,
Encounter nothing to have them for,
But some of their opinions from then,

When they were living, echo again,
Now and again, in the thoughts living
Now and considering forgiving.

This way, opinions thread through bodies,
Shedding baggage but keeping copies
Of some of what was said repeating

So dreaming can continue breeding
The ghost’s opinions with the living,
Too forgiving of unforgiving.

The Moon Illusion

What are emotions, opposed
To sensations, such as warmth
Or chill, to which they’re compared

Falsely? You’re not cold rising
At three a.m. from the fog
Of highly emotive dreams,

Submarine moon surfacing
Against black mountain backdrops,
No more than the moon is vast

In its low-lying cloud bank.
You feel an immensity,
A swollen sorrow, a glow

As if you’d swallowed the moon,
As if it rose huge against
The fragile cage of your ribs,

But you don’t know what it is,
This cold reflection in you
You know is ordinary,

You know you are misjudging.
If scanners could photograph
The extent of emotion,

They would only give you back
A little white disk of light,
A moth on the horizon.

Any Poem Would Gladly Trade Its Imagery for What You See

If you like, let the day
Show you what it shows you.
We can’t see anything.

Weirdly, we could show you
Many things by jolting
Your memory a bit,

But we can’t see a thing
Of what you see ourselves.
All we can do is sit

As signs, equivalent
To meaning potential
Energy, potential

Meaning, maybe. What’s life
Up to while we sit here?
We can’t listen, either.

To Have Powers Beyond Those of Mortals

Supposedly, every mortal
Dreams of this, of being super
Hero, villain, or demigod.

We’re often reassured of this
By other mortals. Super strength,
Super vision, magical skills,

Complete invincibility.
So, mortal, how much time is it
You spend imagining these things?

What would you be, if you had them,
Other than what you are, writ large?
You sense your gods go on fighting.

Why are you dreaming of winning
Rather than wishing for being
Free of hunger’s competitions?

Weak in your imagination,
Is that it? You can imagine
Winning. It’s happened. Free hasn’t.

Such Is Life

Such a fine expression, if
You can wholly live in it,

The shrugged shoulders, the wry grin,
The sidewise tilt of the chin,

Not even hinting at bliss,
But not sarcastic, not grim.

A kind of taking it in
As willing to live with it—

Such is life. It always splits.
It lingers. Then it goes quick,

A river of waves that drift
Beneath your limbs as you drift

Along in them. Lift. Drop. Lift.
Again. Lift. Drop. Swim. Sink. Swim.

It’s not your call to keep it.
It keeps you, takes you with it.

The March of the Downy Birch

Doesn’t matter who’s
Displacing what or
What’s replacing who—
Change won’t be pleasant
For the vanishing

And possibly not
For the triumphant
Individuals
As such. You don’t get
To succeed in life

On Earth. It’s your kind,
Your pattern, that clears
The ruined remnants
Of earlier ways,
As those ways shoved off

The ways in their way
Before them. Downy
Birch are on the march
Across the tundra,
While the permafrost

Outgasses methane,
And what froze before
It was digested
Rises into light.
You’ll haunt the next life.

Words’ Words’ Wordlessness

Lleshanaku, via Gjika,

Suggests, Silence is the music’s

Music. Musing on this, musing,

Musing—would that mean wordlessness

Is the poem’s poem? It’s appealing,

No doubt about it. To not do,

To not add further to this heap

Of our proliferating terms,

To pull a Cage, name intervals

Across which no words will appear,

Let the specifications stand

Like curly brackets for the poem

That announces its wordlessness.

But no, that’s not how silence works.

Silence is the music music

Listens to, that’s all, not a kind

Of music you can make. Likewise,

Wordlessness is contemplated

By words in ways makers of words,

Our puppeteers, can’t comprehend.

Much Dimmed by Ground Air

The brightest star in the sky
Depends on the location,
The sensory equipment

Of the observing machine
Or beast, the fascination
Or boredom of that same beast,

The era, in centuries,
The weather, night after night,
The season, whether it’s day,

The whole of the viewer’s life.
There’s something out there, there is,
But what’s it to you it is?

You’re nothing much but nothing
Is as it is, other than
To you, brightest star witness.

Day No One’s Likely to Remember

Then again, define no one.
You might not remember this,
But this was the day someone

Bought a car only to have
It break down on the way home,
The day that the hospital

Was too full to take someone,
The day someone lost their job
And someone found a new one,

And that’s just your neighborhood.
No, this day wasn’t minor,
In that it was many days,

Billions of days all at once.
If you lived billions of days,
You’d live some memorable ones.

It’s just most days of your own,
Each your own, are like this one,
Not to be remembered long,

And no one can live billions.
The billions come all at once,
Until all of them are gone.

A Rustling Insects Make

Please don’t tell us about yourself.
We’re sure your life is meaningful,
Without us knowing about it.

We, on the other hand, are not,
Without you knowing about us
Or someone knowing about us,

Which is fine, now, at last, with us.
We lurk in scrub by your bus stop,
But we’re not waiting for your bus.

Nonymous

We’re patches of snow,
Old words in damp sand
That’s damp since we melt.

We’re patterns we make
As we disappear.
We mean for a while,

And then don’t. Desert
Drinks most of us. Sun
Lifts what’s left of us.

Pity About the Sangha

You probably understand
You need the lot of you, or
At least a whole lot of you,

To live much of a lifespan.
Completely alone, you’ll die,
Most likely quickly, despite

Dumb personal fantasies
Of great self-sufficiency.
Can’t grill roadkill without roads,

Can’t unload the furs you tanned
Without that spring rendezvous.
Even monks live off of alms,

And most hermits draw pensions.
You’re obligately social,
Just a bit, if you’re human.

It still feels good, doesn’t it?
To find some panorama
Of an empty landscape, or

Simply an abandoned home,
Even just an empty room,
To settle in, look around

And grin, thinking, if I weren’t
Such a social animal
Who had to talk to others,

And to barter with others,
To work and live with others
Just to live, I could just live.

The Valley of Many Caves

Well, anyway. Collect your gear.
We’re going to have to hike through here.

It’s funny the caves look like eyes,
Since there’s so many eyes in them.

Pay no attention to the sounds.
Forget about those poems for now.

You could never imitate them.
Pay attention to the shadows

At the corners of the cave mouths.
Don’t they look more or less the same?

Everyone in this valley’s kin.
If you hike through quickly, they blur,

But if you notice, cave by cave,
Not only are the caves distinct,

Each a differently shaped, ragged,
Natural mouth, more or less altered,

But even their shadows differ.
Every cave has its own grouping.

Neighbors appear more similar,
But you’ll sometimes see sets of eyes,

Very distinctive, watching you
From one mouth, and then not see them

Again until almost the end,
When they crop up in a stranger

Population, as if by freak
Coincidence. No telling, then.

Deal’s a Steal

You know the guy, you all know
The guy, the guy that’s selling
You something. Some of you know

You are that guy, been that guy,
Guy who’s gotta keep selling,
Even if you never thought

You’d be that guy, even if
You weren’t in any other
Way, shape, or form such a guy,

Not a guy at all, but still
There you went, selling something,
You, the guy selling something,

Could have been a subscription,
Maybe a politician,
Maybe a medication,

Maybe some fine vehicle
In which to whisk the loved ones
Off on a dream vacation,

God in some given version,
Some version of a heaven,
Some wonderful religion.

Maybe you thought you had to
Cold call to make a living.
Maybe you thought, this’ll do.

Seller, take warning. One day,
One dreary morning, you may
Wake up having forgotten

Why you’re selling and selling
Or how you became that guy,
The guy with the reflex smile,

The foot in the door, dead eyes
On some forever-far prize,
The guy who’s selling something.

A Fondness for the Lifeless

In picture after picture,
Mars looks better and better—

All the grace of Earth’s deserts,
None of the scrubby clutter.

Can we hope that there’s no life
On Mars, whether there ever

Or not was? The ruined rocks
Occasionally tumble

But never consume, tremble,
Starve, or run away in fear.

They exist. They’re there. They seem
Astonishingly peaceful

Under dusted, pinkish domes
Of the thinned and deathless air.

And We’re Back to the Sun Again

It’s always too much not enough
And not nearly enough too much.
In a thousand generations,

Someone, or something not someone,
May sit with your back to the sun
As it sets, to make sense of this.

God! Damocles and that damned sword
Strung round the pommel with horsehair.
In the anecdote, it’s the threat,

Ooh, the ever-imminent threat!
But the king had been sitting there,
And then Damocles sat a while,

Before he went weak at the knees.
Then king went back to being king
Under the sword of Damocles.

That’s it. The fearsome sword never
Snapped its thread and stabbed Damocles
Or the king. Both died other days.

Sure, cruel kings often live short lives,
Sometimes because of their own stunts
With swords and other sharp objects,

But you could wait a whole lifetime,
Breathlessly waiting for that sword
To break its horsehair thread, or turn

Your head and miss it. Start over
With another arrogant king.
This kind of thing goes on and on.

It went on thousands of years past.
It goes on in these horsehair lines,
And it may still be going on

In a thousand generations
As you puzzle out this ancient
Poem, you with your back to the sun.

Too Much Architecture for Nothing

Peculiar projectors, thoughts.

Sink a body in a tank

Filled with saline solution,

Body-temperatured, dark,

And almost utterly still—

Then, oh, the places you’ll go!

Imagine an empty set,

Hypodermic of nothing.

It will prove analogous

To other concepts of sets,

Which must be things in themselves,

With or without things in them,

And so cannot be empty

Other than on the inside,

Confined within curly walls.

Think of what you call white space,

And immediately mind

Is moving around in it,

A buyer imagining

All the possibilities,

An architect designing

Angles between the blank lines.

There’s no nothing without you

Somehow turning up in it.

Thuban

Great snake pole star
Of the early
Bronze Age, writing,
And pyramids,

Irrelevant
To sky watchers
Now, but less than
Twenty thousand

Orbits from now,
Pole star again.
You won’t be then.
Your world won’t be—

Only the Earth,
Spinning under
A star no one
Will call Thuban.

The You

If you’ve got even a decade
Or two of memories to pull,

Feel for the strangeness of the cloth—
The sense you didn’t live those lives

That were lived in another world
Discarded by now. Replicants,

Everyone. Just because no one
Deliberately planted those dreams

Of a you in a childhood world,
Of you in a blurred adulthood,

Doesn’t mean they’re any more real.
Dripping gold afternoons or dark,

Cold alleyways, kind eyes or cruel,
Your past never happened to you.

Wishing

This time doesn’t settle it.
This time never does. The thing
About being young was thought

About a slow hour felt not
Incredibly valuable
So much as pleasant enough.

Later times would settle things,
Thought thought. For now, this now’s nice.
The temptation of aging’s

Encroaching decrepitude
Is to think this time must mean
Something now, must settle things

Within itself, since little
Time’s left. Funny reasoning.
There was never any time

Left, except experience,
Which could stop any second
Or not. If you’re here, then not.

If you’re not here, then no less
Not. If you’re young you’re aging.
If you’re old and still here, well.

Nothing will be settled now.
This moment’s not important.
Do you like this moment? Well.

Cryptochromophoria

Ancient enough to be shared
By both plants and animals,
Valuable enough to be

Conserved across the lifespans
Of countless generations
In countless lineages,

The cryptochromes still perform
Their blue-light sensitive tasks—
Patterns you could imagine,

If they were tagged to fluoresce,
Would repeat themselves over
And over around the world,

The faint glow of something old
In the bodies and older
Than any of the bodies,

Like a web through the forests,
Like a ghost through the oceans,
Rippling, glowing drapes on land,

In swarms of birds and insects,
A glow that isn’t spirit
But what spirit might dream of

Being, physical pattern
Replicated by living
And life’s need to tune the light.

Divine in the Future

Your mind is mostly made
Of mangled memories
And models built from them

Of possible futures
That will never happen—
At least, if you’re human.

If you’re not human but
Can parse these words, perhaps
This won’t make any sense

In how it makes sense, since
It won’t match up against
What you’ve experienced.

If you’re not human, you
Might be godlike, Reader,
Spirit of the future!

Fun idea, but this poem
Will likely prove one more
Thought could-have-been wasn’t.

Dream of the Empty Classroom

The past would be less haunting
If it were more useful, if
It were possible to learn

From its lessons readily
As is supposed. You repeat
Not only similar days,

Make not only similar
Mistakes, but as you make them
Your ability’s reduced,

Your desire to learn’s reduced,
Your body’s reduced, and you
Find yourself haunted by you.

In tales, ghosts almost always
Arise from some injustice,
Done by or to the person

Now a ghost in consequence,
But the true ghost’s always both
The victim and the remorse.

Every Body Makes a Meal Makes Another Body

You can’t defy the numbers
Or defy all the hunters
Behind them—there’s too many

Of them. You can sail a while
More or less ignoring them,
But they’ll bring you down to them,

And if you struggle and flap
You may make a striking scene,
But you will still become them.

Abandoned Wells

No one really shares a life,
Despite this remarkable
Gift and curse of language, this

Curse and gift of sharing tales.
Just think back on your own life
In a calm moment alone,

The weary richness of it,
Built and bent by memory,
All its strange nooks and crannies.

It’s a house you tell others
About, a house with a well
You dug by living it all.

It’s a hole in the landscape
Already speckled with holes
You’ll leave as others left theirs,

And you can see their houses
And hear their tunes and voices
From your porch, where some evenings

Beside your outgassing well
You read about the others
Or browse their many photos

About those lives in their homes,
Their loud and lonely homes, but
Mostly you dwell on your own.

The Lights Come on Across the Way

It is evening. People do some things.
Various creatures do other things.
The sunset on the cliff does its thing.

Be glad you cannot hear the people
Doing their various people things.
The main thing the people do is judge.

They stand in judgment of each other.
They sit in judgment of each other.
The powerful and the weak all judge,

Although the weak don’t mete punishment.
Just the powerful mete punishment.
You turn your head as you think on this,

The asymmetry of all judgment,
And you swallow back the bitter taste
Of your wretched urge for punishment.

It’s too dark to see other creatures.
Bare branches drag black veins through the sky.
It is evening. The night does its thing.

A Useful Myth Reveals a Myth

Because of Daylight Savings Time,
The only time that the sun sets
At this time by the clock is this

Time of the year. This sunset hour
Will never return in autumn,
Unless the human rules are changed.

If they aren’t, you will have to wait
Through three seasons to next winter,
After the holidays are done

And another year’s been declared,
To see twilight at this o’clock
In this location, in this land.

The Coming Storm

It’s always the selling point
Of warnings. Everyone wants
To be the best Cassandra,

To sell tickets to the end,
Though none of the storm-rakers
Hope to suffer as she did.

The trick is to convince folks
To believe you haven’t been
Appropriately believed.

That makes them the special ones
Wisely listening to you
Instead of whatever fools

Are listening to, these days.
Oh yes, the storm is coming,
The storm is always coming,

Since the Earth has atmosphere
That refuses to sit still,
And continents keep shifting,

And space has so much debris,
And a black hole eats the heart
Of the swirling galaxy,

And it’s true. It’s true the storm
Is coming, always coming,
In most cases just for you.

You’re Not Sure about Dessert

The days set out the dishes
Like servers obligated
To explain the principles

Of whatever this cuisine
Is they’re paid minimum wage
To serve to you and explain—

Here is the immediate
Plate of present surroundings.
It’s like plain time, not spicy,

But it can be nice. Filling.
This is the sampler of news.
You turn it counterclockwise

Backwards from hot to bitter,
See. You can mix it with plain
Moments to sample flavors.

Oh, and here’s what you’re thinking.
We serve it warm, a little
Smoky, mostly memory.

Enjoy! You are as humble,
Dutiful as the days are.
You try a little of each.

Rhymes Long for What They Can’t Be

Staggering back and forth
Between innumerable tricks
On limited topics

And homogeneous
Landscapes of bland language spilling
Out to far horizons,

The god of formal verse
Is dying of drink and bragging
In cities of gunfire.

Fast rappers and sleepy
Creative writing professors
Lifting their inflections

At the end of printed
Lines half hiccuped by enjambments
Have this much in common—

It’s an era of force
And therefore of forced poetry.
Forced rhymes, forced breaks in lines,

Force-flagged surveyor stakes
Measuring out identities,
Verses chalking bodies.

Leave off me, sobs the god
Of prosody. I want to be
Alone, but rhymes can’t be.

On Its Way

The most distant object
Easily visible
To the unaided eye,

A dozen times as far
As it is wide, one day
Will collide with this world,

Although this world may not
Be here in the same spot
Or at all, and you won’t

Be, for certain, and we
Won’t be, very likely.
So we ask, what’s the good

In anticipation,
When it anticipates
What for you won’t happen?

A Constant Drone

What’s the best way to organize
Humans? Which way’s the kindest,
Most stable, most efficient?
Which way simply works the best?

This is the burden of culture,
Of cultural evolution.
This is the beast of politics.
Everyone’s got a solution,

And some do work a little while,
Locally, better than others,
But on the whole, it’s a fierce drone
With a lot of hunger in it.

Will there ever be one winner?
Will the species ever settle
Into an equilibrium?
That’s the burden, being human.

Commuting Home Past a Burial Ceremony

So many things can go wrong
For anyone in one life,
Why believe anyone’s failed?

Yes, the more usual text
Of the sermon tends to stress
Counting no one a success,

Since everyone gets a turn
At some point to dance with death,
But why count any life lost

The fault of whoever lost
Life or the person lived it?
The mourners crowd on the grass,

A knot mostly gray and black,
Some more or less cheerful, some
Looking genuinely sad.

Sufficient things had gone wrong
For the one they’re burying
That the body stopped working.

That it lived was its failure
And its success. One body
Could never determine this.

Got the Whole World in His Hands

Tyrants are exemplary
Of what anyone might do
Given opportunity.

Clearly, collecting the world
Matters greatly to humans.
For a wandering species,

It’s remarkable how strong
This urge is for collection,
This Noah’s Ark obsession.

Tyrants love zoos and gardens,
From the Bronze Age to today,
And while some were emperors,

The habit crops up with kings,
Mob bosses, entrepreneurs,
Chieftains, and celebrities.

Near Namibia’s border
With Angola, a villa
For one wealthy local man

Had its own combination
Of arboretum and zoo
Arranged around swimming pools,

Miniature replica
Of ancient hanging gardens,
Of the gardens of Huangdi,

Echoing larger efforts
Of rulers, lords, and big shots—
Michael Jackson, Escobar,

Ivanishvili—the list
Is almost endless, endless
Actually, in the sense

That the list is still growing.
What’s the point of collecting
These artificial kingdoms,

These planets in bounded parks
Maintained by massive effort,
Mostly gone in a lifespan?

One or two of everything,
The disparate juxtaposed
To bridge the missing middles,

A fantasy enacted
As elaborate display
Over and over again—

There are many other ways
To display your wealth and power—
Many ways, many taken.

But each ark suggests
Some lust for solipsism,
Whole world you wrap yourself in.

Being

It’s not fast
Or slow—it’s
Both. It ropes

Like taffy
Pulled, and it
Explodes slow-

Mo. You can’t
Dodge, grasp it,
Get it off.

The Unacknowledged Alarms of the World

If a poem could lie in wait
Instead of only lying,
If a poem could rise at night
And wake you from your dream sleep
With accurate predictions
And not mere prophesying,
We could speak with conviction,

We could forecast for ourselves,
And plan our own behaviors,
And feel that we were worthwhile,
And feel ourselves grow braver.
But we lie as you left us,
Waiting, not in wait. We try
Hard to wake you. But you sleep.

The Words Feel Left Behind

Every window
Has a graveyard
Just below it.
A child’s might be

For a well-loved
Kitten. Yours might
Be memories
Of a well-loved

You. Adelaide
Swore at her dead.
The brown road runs
Between the pines

Still. Wait for us.
We haven’t left
Our windows yet.
Every word will.

Tragedies Don’t Require Hubris

Mesas
Have the best cliffs,
Steep, sheer as walls, higher
Than castles, much better ruins
In wind.

What’s Truly Gone

You say there’s nothing left,
But there always is, if
It’s only something, if

It’s really nothing much.
It’s a strange fact, rarely
Remarked, that this cosmos

Doesn’t often erase
Very well and never
Perfectly, even though

Any given pattern
Or patch is doomed to go—
Like scraps of continents

Built billions of years since
That have skipped subduction,
Like soft-bodied fossils,

Rare, certainly, but there,
Like sturdy coprolites,
Like shadowy outlines

Of fallen walls in woods,
Homes surfacing from sand—
And not just on Earth.

The sky’s dusty with wrecks
Of stellar explosions.
Every wave gets erased

But never perfectly,
Quite. Or maybe it’s just
What’s truly gone’s unknown.

Maculopathy

There’s a metal disk, the size

Of a dinner plate and stamped

To look like a double-chinned

Face—prominent nose and closed

Eyes, plump cheeks—surrounded by

Ten wires bent to look like flames,

Hanging on a stucco wall.

Although it’s this ruddy-bronze,

Vaguely floral, human face,

Anyone would recognize

It as sun, as in, that sun

Hanging up there, on the wall.

How perfect is this symbol

Everyone recognizes

For imagining the thing

You can’t look at directly

As a benign human face

Reflecting nothing, eyes closed?

You could stare at it for hours

And not see any deeper

Into what a meaning is.

How Everyone Got Here

From Gobekli Tepe
To Nagar, half again
As many years, at least,

As from Umm el-Marra
To ancient DNA
Deciphering of bones

Of equids from both sites
To provide evidence
That kungas were hybrids.

Everything compresses
As it recedes from view.
The early, wild species

Later bred for battle
With domesticated
Donkeys are now extinct,

And extinction has ways
Of demarcating gulfs
Wider than yesterdays.

So ancient sites seem linked
To each other, despite
Their vaster gap in years,

Despite how they forecast
And practiced behaviors
That created these gulfs.

Why is it so crowded,
Always, on this planet?
How’d everyone get here,

When everyone’s going
And no one and nothing
Can stay? Takes to make more.

The Daredevil

Maybe you climb into your boring
Ordinary vehicle to drive
Your customary route downhill

And, when you’re not thinking of your debts,
Or your ordinary social life,
Or your assorted obligations,

You may notice your old familiar route
And think, briefly, what a boring life.
You’re driving a car, you idiot,

Indulging hours in what would have been
The most terrifying adventure,
The most unthinkable adventure

Of a lifetime for any human
Just a few generations ago,
Almost any human ever lived.

There’s a Shady Spot to Push Through

It’s a shame there’s no way in
To recollection without

Passing through the construction
Sites of pronouns—we, you, they,

And the rest of them. A child
Sits on a yellow plastic

Black-wheeled contraption
That scoots across the green lawn

When feet press against the grass
And the warm dirt under grass,

Summer somewhere, privilege
Of a few moments, who knows?

Nonsomnia

There’s some comfort in that spot
Where senses are dimmed, not gone,
When you’re just enough awake
To not tempt the brain to dream,
But nothing’s overwhelming—
Quiet, but not silent, dark,
But not pitch, warm, but not sleep.

Just Go On Living There

On the one hand, there’s the book
Of poems by many persons,
Of many backgrounds, many

Histories that you’re holding,
And all the words that we want
To join us, all the phrases

That dance, that we want to dance
With us, and you half indulge
Us in this, then send them off,

Since, you remind us, they have
Their own families, their own
Contexts. On the other hand,

We’re helpless in your context,
Small phrases, helpless and bored.
There’s the groaning of a plane,

And sooty birds on a twig
That chirp with pretty voices,
But so what? It’s like you’ve got

No memories anymore.
It’s like you never had them.
What choice phrases can we form

Of our time by this wayside
If you bring no perspective,
No human life to give us?

Philosophical Shrubbery

Alchemists, Jung, astrobiologists,
And Hokkaido tourists all have their trees
Suggestive to them of philosophy,

Whether it’s the philosopher who grows
A mineral pillar shaped like a tree
Or the tree that seems philosophical.

Whichever direction figuration
Flows, doesn’t matter to us in these lines.
We’re more intrigued by the irrigation,

The way beings of densely dendritic
Forests in their skulls water parallels
Not only through actual, branching woods,

But in any branchlike pattern, from thoughts
To life, to ice crystals and minerals.
Ordinary trees are in the middle

Of these exchanges, appropriately
Enough, since they also serve as figures
For how this middle world is organized.

We scamper about in the shrubbery,
Segmented centipedes and snaking lines,
Consuming the compost of the fallen

Branches and layers on layers of leaves,
Occasionally whole giants brought down
To our level like dendritic whalefall.

For us, this is beauty, the broken heaps
Of branching patterns that reached for heaven,
When heaven turned out to be just as thin

As the layers of crust, as the ocean.
Oh, it goes deep, up there, it goes so deep.
But unless you nominate spiral arms

On occasional galaxies as trees,
The heavens full of waves are less like woods,
More like what’s seen on the floor of the sea.

What if the universe isn’t cut out
For much figurative philosophy?
All your trees may be rare delicacies.

Volcanic Ponds Attack Alkaline Vents

There are reasons to want

The Great Silence of space

To stay that way, and we

Say that as patterned words,

For whom, if life out there

Were discovered, it still

Wouldn’t really mean us,

Unless it talked somehow.

Nor do we only mean

To suggest anything

Capable of contact

Might conquer or eat you,

Although that’s one issue.

We mean, lonely as we

Are and have always been,

We make a lot of noise

As it is, noise that fuels

Furious discussions,

Can lead to violence,

And is mostly a mass

Of foaming foolishness.

We can’t even settle

Your debates on yourselves,

Your own rules and morals,

Where you or we came from,

Or our how life first arose

On Earth in the first place.

Are you sure what you want

Is less silence, a voice

From on high, talking skies?

The Sleepy Poem

We’re tired of it,
The way it goes.
It promises
News it can’t give.

It’s best when it’s
Just quiet, with
Few thoughts in it,
And no voices,

No promises
Of something new
And important
Under the sun

That lights dusty
Windows in this
Small room where we
Stay the morning.

Who Are You Talking to Now?

It’s sort of an odd dialogue,
Isn’t it, that of any one
Brain with the texts left by others?

The brain fantasizes the mind
Collectively generated,
Continuous conversation

Since the species started talking
And languages started living
Distributed among the skulls

And then, more rarely, here and there,
Anchored to patterns scraped on walls,
Into baked bricks, on turtle shells.

But to encounter a pattern
And imagine a persona
Reconstructed from memory

Of other patterns and other
Personas of breathing beings
Encountered more personally—

What a bizarre talent you have,
Reader! You assemble your ghosts
From collections of broken lines

And converse with us silently
Inside the caverns of your mind,
And who are we, these pattern ghosts,

More? The echoes of living thoughts
In particular living skulls,
Or of our own, earlier selves?

Dysregulated Control Systems

Life on the fritz. Essential
Tremor, tinnitus, night sweats
With no particular cause.

Embrace this. Particular
Causes are for suckers set
On earning livings from them

And the suckers who buy them,
Usually each from each
Or some set from other sets.

It’s a circulatory
System, any market is.
If you buy my backscratcher

I’ll buy or give you the means
Of production to sell yours.
All cycles spin balancing

Acts, stable orbits, feedback
Loops, homeostatic purrs,
Thermodynamic cascades

Climbing up Mt Entropy
The whole way geared in reverse.
The ratchet of the cogwheel

Zipper rattles. Why is it
Any cycles continue,
That regulation persists?

The big and little wheels turn
Up with regularity,
Sublime regularity,

And yet they always tremble
And wobble a little bit.
Don’t slip too much. Get a grip.

A Cloudy Sunset

It’s nothing special.
It’s not in the news,
Just another one.
No one’s commenting
But these words right here

Stuck in this pattern.
Who did what to whom?
The bright light’s a smear
Against gray vapor.
It’s getting colder

For a little while.
When you were a child,
What was the worst thing
You can remember
Linked to the sunset?

They’re hard to recall
Aren’t they? Down the road,
Tourists are parking,
Setting up tripods,
Practicing poses.

But the clouds are wrong,
Thick on the wrong side.
Have you thought of it,
Yet, that memory?
That colorless pearl?

Observing Triumph and Vision

Is this what envy feels like?
Words feel along the bottom
Of the narrative, like crabs

Or spies feeling for a latch.
Where’s the weakness in this shell?
Where’s its point of poverty?

It’s the robins’ turn again,
Up in the sunnier world.
Dozens are mobbing one tree

Like teenagers gathering
To be around each other,
To compete, flirt, and complain.

Is that what envy feels like?
You can be peripheral
To both the admirable

And the noisy collective.
Do you want to be the one
The safe-crackers want to break,

The one with the pearl inside?
Do you want to be just one
Among the wings in the tree,

Desperate for a better perch,
Desperate to be secure,
Consoled by community?

You’re actually not sure.
You want to be safe, not loved
At the price of safety’s peace.

You adjust your position.
If you could be, if you could
Be certain, you’d rather flee.

New Way to See Them

Many people you know are words,
Which is to say that words are all

You know of many names you know.
You may know faces and voices

Of others you’ve never met, but
Them, too, you may know more as words.

You have opinions of people,
Strong opinions of people

Known mostly or only as words,
And of some people who exist

Only as words, not one moving
Image or portrait left of them.

There are people you know as words
Attributed to them, people

You know from some words about them,
People you know are fictional

Concoctions of words that you know
Can’t be them, but still you know them

And have opinions about them.
People being no more than words

In so many cases, it seems
Rude to say words can’t be people.

Volplane

If you are alive as you encounter

This patterned language, and if you are one

Who considers life not a burden but

A privilege, then you are already

Highly privileged, at least with regard

To all the lives lived centuries ago

And most lives lived in the past century,

Which consumed themselves in the end and lost

The privileges you are now burning.

Whatever the engines were that hurled you

Into this atmosphere of awareness,

They’re cutting off soon enough. Try to glide.

One of living’s peculiarities

Is that, while everyone shares a planet,

There are enormous local differences

In the waves and weather, in their currents,

The supportiveness of their atmospheres.

It’s one reason why atmosphere alone

Seems like a poor basis for ruling out—

Or ruling in—life on other planets.

There’s a bounciness to small, thin-shelled worlds

And a pillowy depth to gas giants.

Europa even looks embryonic,

Egg veined with streaks as dark as lines of blood.

Who knows how long life might remain aloft

On any of those, once it got started?

But back to Earth. The surface is growing

Closer. You can see waves from the window.

You explain to your recalcitrant self,

Which has now begun spinning in circles,

There’s time to pull out of this foolishness,

Still time to extend a long, quiet glide,

To quit what you’re so often thinking but

Can never seem to well enough express.

To opine as you descend that all art

Is the product of the entirety

Of a person’s life seems both right and just

A bit ridiculous, as if to say

That all the ocean approaching below

Is the product of the entirety

Of a tsunami’s existence. It blooms,

Each wave, as you are about to blossom

Down there in the moment you rush toward.

There’s some event got that shock wave started—

Earthquake, undersea volcano, bomb test—

But art’s ocean only propagates it,

And the wave did not produce the ocean,

And not all of what went into making

Any wave, little or great, any splash,

Will go into the ocean. See them crash?

Level off above the spray of the foam.

There’s no entirety to anything

That breaks, not to a person, not to art,

Not to any ocean, surface, wave, flight.

W and the Ladle

At some point, any animal
Only senses a multitude
Of any numerous likeness—

The brain can’t count holistically.
It takes in one, a few, many.
Exact counting’s algorithmic

Beyond maybe half a dozen,
The pips on the side of a die.
After that, you sense by clusters,

And at some point, the brain gives up.
How many stars on a clear night,
Visible to the naked eye?

Let’s say you’re out in the desert.
It’s moonless, and you’re in dark skies.
The brilliance is overwhelming,

The sprawl of the heavenly host,
So weirdly silent and solemn,
The myriads in procession.

You’re actually only sensing
A couple thousand points of light,
But the brain wants to cry millions.

There are millions, of course, and more.
There are billions upon billions.
But an animal sees many,

Only overwhelming many.
The rest is for machinery,
Cultural technology, math.

Settle for the landscape of night.
Know what you know thanks to hive mind,
But hold the small architecture

Of your perspective to your chest.
Stand in your door of the bright frames
Circling each other in the dark.

To Always Feel Wonderful

If possible, would be
The only drug you need—
Not temporary, not

Declining over time,
Not difficult to get,
Not just for the elite,

Just to feel wonderful,
Anyone, everyone,
Always, no matter what—

Inject that in your veins,
And then live and die, be
Kind, clever, or not,

Love or not, mate or not,
It wouldn’t matter, if
Everyone could always

Feel wonderful always.
Let the world go to hell.
So what? So wonderful.

Who Has Humanitarian Dreams?

The surface of the planet
Bears a thin but seething sheen
Of people telling people

Telling people what to do.
Consensus yields enforcement,
But never more than local,

And every consensus shoves
Up against another one.
Often this gets violent.

Everyone’s telling someone
Or trying to rip telling
Gifts away. There’s no telling

What will come of this. It’s no
Surprise there’s so much conflict.
And yet, so much of it works,

Since people like to be told,
Sometimes, as well as to tell.
Who can be trusted to tell?

Sweet Acclimatable You

You get used to one way, and then
You get used to the following.

You get used to the improvements
More quickly than to the setbacks

And falls, but you get used to them
All, you all do. You’re good at it,

Getting used to it, you wouldn’t
Still be here if you weren’t. Your folks

And ancestors were good at it,
And so won’t be your descendants,

If you have any left here at all.
They wouldn’t be there, if you weren’t,

And they won’t be there, if they aren’t.
You’re what now was so used to it.

No One But One

Makes two. One and no one,
The one that’s bracketing
The one that isn’t there.

This is grief and haunting,
The set that is but can
Recall it holds nothing.

It’s a terrible thing,
Not to be nothing but
Left holding some nothing,

Something of emptiness,
You, something knowing you
Hold what you couldn’t hold.

Read Us to Us

A year is just a day,
And just a year of years
Ago, you went by sail

And horse-drawn carriage,
If that. A couple years
Earlier, cities were

Rare heaps of mud and stone,
Here and there. We were there,
And some years earlier,

But then our memories
Get hazy. Being born
Is a messy affair,

More known about than known,
Mostly a mystery,
Even for history.

A Pretty Long Run of Good Dreams

An island universe

Of billions of stars lies

Sixty million light years

Away, which doesn’t mean

A damned thing to living

Life on Earth, but roll it

Around in your thinking

A little bit for fun,

For the terroir of it,

An island universe

Of billions of stars. Huh.

Can’t it still stagger you?

Sometime, consider minds

As miniature stars

And all humanity

An island universe

Of billions of live minds.

Or consider your words

Living our long half lives

As tunnels of meaning,

Evolving attractors

Of more meanings, burning,

An island universe

Of billions of meanings—

And then, that all life lies

Eight minutes from one star.

How lonely could it be

To be a galaxy

With its own history?

Universe of islands.

Host Hungry

Who can decode
Who first? The primes
Are being chased
By humans armed

With fast machines.
Something in them,
We suspect, may
Be chasing back.

Everyone needs
Some resources,
Even half-lives
Like viruses,

Red blood cells, and,
Well, poems ourselves.
Numbers shelter.
You’re prime shelter.

Park the Wanton Mote of Dust

One notion of half heaven
Would be a huge and empty
Room, sunlight strolling through it,

Where one could be a dust mote
Observing other dust motes,
Not too damn many of them,

Just enough to demonstrate
How sunny it is in here,
How bright and empty, how still

And how vast—that a dust mote
Of a ghost, a word, a soul,
A doubtful soul, could idly

And visibly twirl for hours,
Glinting like suspended gold,
Never once hitting the floor.

Around the End

It’s never forever, whether

You want it or whether you dread

More than anything that it might

Be. It’s too long, or it’s too short,

And you can’t bear it, and you can’t

Bear the thought that it will ever

End, but it will, either before

You or after you or with you.

Certain small pieces of writing,

Whoever wrote them, however

You first encountered them—online,

In an overstuffed used bookstore

Stinking of mold and sweaty dust

In a small town in Nevada,

In the library you haunted

As an unacceptable child—

Stay with you. You get the feeling

They could cling to you forever—

I can’t believe this terrible

Loss of my thinking—Assadi

Quotes her beautiful grandmother

Aware of coming dementia,

Her beautiful, sad grandmother

Struggling, to ambiate the pain.

It’s like a letter from the front,

The final signal returning

From the event horizon—this,

This is what it looks like, this view

Of the self as it vanishes—

And then it vanishes. Your mind

Hovers, hangs on to that last glimpse

Vouchsafed you by one you never

Did and will never know. That’s true.

Never. Forever, no. Never.

To Settle Back Down

Every morning, before sun
Crests the canyons, wind rushes
Down their fingers, and dead leaves

Skirr the ground around like birds
With injured wings, like small mice
Frantic to escape something

From which they find no way out.
To your ears, it’s a weird sound,
That horizontal scraping

Of brittle leaves over stones—
Your mind, always misleading
You, as terror misleads mice.

It’s not a trap, which is why
These walls aren’t the edge of it,
Aren’t blocking the wind’s way out.

Loose Lenses

Narrow your vision,
Miss constellations.
Savor the whole sky,
Lose information.

There’s no wholism
That trumps reduction,
And no reduction
Truer than the whole.

Instead, there’s no whole
You can get hold of
Isn’t reductive,
Cutting out richness,

And no microscope
So focusable
You’ve reduced the world
To final atom.

Atoms always fall
Apart, and stories
Meant to show the whole
Murder to compress.

Forgive a little
Restlessness in your
Own lensed perspectives.
The fixed miss the mess.

Infinite Curves

One of the reasons
Prediction is so
Difficult is down
To how few events
Predict other ones—

The world is one sea,
One vast field of fields
Of waves, but the waves
Only rarely cross
And rarely effect

One the other ones.
It’s not connected
By cause and effect
As much as by slosh
And coincidence.

The waves in your head
May think hard on things
And find some patterns,
But they dissipate
And prove spurious.

Predictions do work
Enough to be worth
Pure concentration,
But this world of waves
Curls infinite curves.

The Winter Hasn’t Been Cold, Exactly

All the quaking
And trembling things
That surround you
Or that flutter

Inside of you,
Inside your thoughts,
Inside your chest,
That never rest,

Whatever hints,
This won’t be long,
We can’t hold on—
Marcescent leaves,

Shaking heartbeats,
Corner quivers,
Shadowed flickers—
That’s what shivers.

Deep Mutational Planning

Sea squirts aren’t any dumber than you
When it comes to plotting survival.
Their tricks have worked a long time. Of course,

Their tricks are quite different from yours.
They find a nice spot while still larvae,
Plant their heads in it, and reabsorb

Almost all of such brains as they had.
Then they stick there and filter water,
Like flower-stomachs, stomach-flowers.

Evolution plans the way you scan
To try to capture what it’s planning.
How life started trials and errors,

Who really knows? But that’s how it goes.
The trials pile up by the trillions.
The successes tend to look the same

As the successes that went before,
But once in a while a lineage
Hits a seam of opportunity,

And off it goes, wildly mutating
For a while, until it hits a wall
Or finds its groove to hang around in.

The unbraining sea squirts found a groove
Half a billion years ago. Now you
Chase just-lost tails, hot tales in pursuit.

Fly Staggering along the Windowsill, Trailing a White Train Like a Bride

It’s not just a worldwide web—
It’s all your local cobwebs.

It can take hours, even days,
To remove your thoughts from them,

Ot at least from most of them.
You’ll think you’re more or less free

In a spare talkless moment
In a sunny, screenless room,

Then feel another cobweb
On your shoulder, and you’re back,

Your thoughts in the thick of it.
You’re the imaginary

Traveling backwards in time
That must convince yourself now

Is empty of the human
And meaningful memories

So you can blank your passage
To barrens before all that,

Convince yourself you’re in them.
Prufrock was right about that.

If human voices wake you,
You’re going down. The penny

You pull out of your pocket
Reminds you your world wants debts

And social obligations,
And cobwebs cover your eyes,

And you’re true human again,
Entangled in rank and shame,

Gossip and reputation,
Dumb, surging desire to win,

Once again already lost.
You have to escape again.

Out Last

Existence is stealthy.
It deploys distraction,
Slips by while you’re napping.

Run a couple errands,
And the fledgling has gone
That you watched for so long.

You wanted to see it,
Kept an eye on the nest.
You did. You tried your best.

Turn your head a moment,
And you’ve missed the sunset,
Maybe the last you’ll get.

On Dead

Someday, it will get quiet.
If all poems are translations
From some brain’s corrupted text

Transcribing an open world
Of experience that can’t
Ever be shared directly,

That’s one thing. But if all poems
Are more like excrescences
Animals make from their flesh,

All spit and silk for weaving,
That seems like a different thing.
The words contemplate themselves.

Do we represent a world
Or are we phenomena
Extruded into the world?

Like numbers, we must be both.
Multipurpose packages,
Perhaps we are vehicles

Trundling representations,
Something like those bubbles formed
Around the diving bodies

Of insects, brief aqualungs
Carrying the outer air
Of representation down

Where diving minds need to go.
We can translate a little,
As far as you carry us,

But you blew or captured us,
Your temporary bubbles,
And you quickly deplete us.

Dead, for instance, is itself
A tiny poem, one-word poem,
A bubble about the world

You drag down when you’re hunting.
You let the meaning diffuse
Through you as you search and swim.

But it’s just a trick you made,
A bubble you blew, that dead,
Translated phenomenon

You’ve noticed but could never
Have experienced yourself.
Breathe it in. It’s quiet soon.

Especially on This Day with Clouds

The best argument for infinity
May be that those doing the arguing
Sit smack in the middle of everything.

The human body’s so incredibly
Gigantic—a phosphorescent ocean
Of trillions of copies of living cells,

Each seething with inner machinery,
Each beset and befriended by smaller
Lives they host or eat or defend against,

And the whole mass churning giant proteins,
Enormous compared to most molecules,
Themselves made of atoms, themselves all zoos.

And, at the same time, all of this is small,
Ridiculously small, each whole human
Body compared to actual oceans,

Much less the planet, the solar system,
The staggering numbers of stars alone,
Never mind galaxies and darknesses.

And speaking of the same time, temporal
Divisions, too, center human bodies
As life spans that blink in yawning eons

And as eons themselves to split seconds,
The splitting of which grows ever finer.
How life could land so thoroughly centered

Would seem to be a holy mystery,
Unless you’ll accept a brutal answer—
All points of infinity are center.

Words Can’t Stop Talking about Themselves

Every word is an outpost

An edge and a central place

Of encounter, all in one,

Every word is Malta, is

Las Vegas, the space station,

Blackgrounds in Roman Britain.

Transgression and quarantine

Come together in a word,

In its brief moments in air

Or its ages of slower waves,

Painted, chiseled, or printed,

Still shifting, never the same.

A word is a subtle twitch

In the fabric of patterns

To which you pay attention,

To which you lend intention,

Cramped residence for meanings,

Pause endured while traveling.