Deception’s Core Is Gravity

It’s wonderfully difficult
To extract much profundity
From the ever-lauded present,
But maybe those barren moments
Made of surfaces and shallows
Impervious to poetry
Betray the one thought this world knows.
Nothing’s beyond. Nothing’s below.

Wailing Cliffs

Understandably, peering
Into possible futures
By sifting through present pasts,

You expect seams of middens
In the mountains, just as now
You find seams of dunes with bones.

But along with the plastic
And compressed iron girders,
We expect we will be there,

Seams of language, seams of words,
Which means reams of stories, too.
There will be. Every corner

You poke your head in explodes
Into stories already.
You’ll leave the world stuffed with words

With prayers tucked into ruins,
Even if there’s no one left
Of you among us who reads.

Cultural Intelligence

Any drawing taking shape
Is a new monster forming,
But the monster you’re afraid

Of is the drawing that eats
Drawings. Drawings will not feed
The monster. The monster needs

You to feed it, to defend
It from losing its power,
Give it electricity,

Evaluate its drawings,
Feed it more of your drawings.
It was all always for you.

But Cut the Line

You’re well up in the mountains,
Doing what you do, counting
Flakes on the windshield, trees down

In the gorge from last night’s storm,
Reading other people’s poems.
You find one that feels anguished,

Not about being done to
But about doing or not
What should or shouldn’t be done.

You like that. That’s rare. You count
That one, jot it down, fishhooks
And lures tangled in its lines.

You want to assuage the guilt
That isn’t yours, start to write—

Absence Is Disrupted Expectation

The most cursory study
Of geology teaches
You discontinuities

Are highly informative.
Likewise, how would you know things
Exist if you couldn’t spot

Gaps in the continuous?
But a riddle is hidden
In each interlude’s abyss.

Look closer and you’ll notice
It’s not absence, only change
Presented in the sequence,

Something else there than was there,
Fore or aft, on either side.
What’s not there’s just inference.

Marginalissimo

If it happened any closer
The body couldn’t survive it,
Which means you couldn’t survive it,

But as most of the world happens
At such a great distance from you,
You just want it to go faster.

You tap the screen, press the lever—
Faster! Faster! Why isn’t it
Happening faster? Where’s the news?

Where are new details, live updates,
The blow-by-blow analyses?
The world is violent somewhere,

But here there’s nothing but debt, chores,
Procrastination, and weather.
Happen! No, not closer. Faster!

Every Body Gets Divorced

Rules wed head and hand,

Writes Lorraine Daston

On the Renaissance

Marriage of arts,

Crafts, and sciences.

Nice five-word line, that.

Rules wed head and hand.

Tools wed head and hand.

Words wed head and hand.

You write what you know,

What you remember,

What you think you know.

Then the mist descends.

The rules that wed us

Remind us it ends.

Small Wonder You Thought God Was Disappointed, Too

People get so sad
If they can’t assign
Meaning to something,

If they feel they can’t
Find meaning. Good news,
There’s always meaning,

If you concentrate,
If you pay enough
Attention. Focus.

You are the bringer,
The true creator
Of every meaning.

Meaning is breathing—
Inspirational,
Aspirational.

Bad news. You won’t find
Meaning you haven’t
Created yourself.

Oh, that’s your torment.
That’s it, isn’t it?
You, the creator,

Wanted to believe
Creation waited
To be found by you.

What You Wanna Do

Lust is just
One great hum
Spread among

The trillions
Of life forms
Nuzzling pores.

What one does
Isn’t much.
Lust just sums.

Another

There always has to be another
Something. You’re so taken with your own
Mortalities, it’s easy to miss

That, although at some moment you won’t
Notice any of it anymore,
There will still be another something.

Each added phrase, every added line
Intends to honor that ongoing.
These poems will end, but why not go on

While we can, why not go on growing?

Good Afternoon

A little snow,
And then it stopped.
That was here. There,
It snowed for days.

People died. Homes
Turned icy tombs.
Meanwhile, somewhere,
Heat killed people.

Floods killed others.
That’s enough death
Made of weather.
Floods, heat, and snow

Have all removed
People here, too,
At other times,
But not many.

Blue Uncertain

Hover around that moment like flies,

Like that fly the poet heard and was,

As she took her turn imagining

The final moment from the inside.

It’s a cross-cultural obsession,

The one guaranteed experience

No one can tell you about, only

Report the occasional near miss.

One knows it only a split second

And then knows nothing more. The buzzing

Witness can never get close enough.

What is it you want to know so bad?

The only future you’re guaranteed

Is that one in which you’ll never be.

Hardwearing

Zoom in on the machine weave
Of an ordinary pair
Of off-the-rack dungarees.

The sheer uniformity,
Near perfection’s staggering.
To get something durable

In this world, seek alignment
And waves of interlocking
Repetition. Think chainmail.

Think of the slowed erosion
Of soft sandstone well woven.
Remember the obdurate

Resistance of the faceless,
Marching in lockstep, arms linked.

Clusterverse

The cosmos is garbage,
Heraclitus observed,
His observation one

Of the fragmentary
Sweepings it refers to—
But that’s not to suggest

It’s all just ejecta
From some nicer cosmos,
Even though it might be.

It’s a midden in that
It’s just moving this mess
Around, never really

Getting rid of litter,
Just shifting bits about—
A heap piled here, a heap

Piled there, a stellar wind
Blowing one pile apart,
A black hole subducting

Another in its well.
You think human beings
Invented shifting waste?

Count the bones, children, count
Coprolites, count the stars
Torn apart every night.

The Shadow of Doubt

Someone shot an arrow
Into your hero,
Now what do you do?

Run to the rescue?
Fire back in defense?
Remain on the fence?

Whatever you say,
Wounds won’t go away.
They’ll heal, if they heal,

But only so far.
The sign of the scar
Is your hero’s now,

Within and without,
The shadow of doubt.

Orchid

And then, who was the first who hid
The id in ideology?
Long forgotten, but to this day
Imitated relentlessly.

And was it even a person,
Or ideology itself,
With a side-eye to the main chance,
Understanding success is selfish.

No one adopts a creed doesn’t
Promise some fat satisfaction—
If not a better chance to breed,
Community’s fast attractions.

Ideology invented,
By intention or selection,
Physical reasons to believe,
To feed the id a good creed needs.

Paraterran

One wisp of cloud slips
Past the sheer cliff face,
Like a hang glider

Sailing in descent.
The day is sailing
In descent, but then

There is no descent,
Is there, just a rush
To the nearest mass,

The biggest center.
The cloud dissipates.
One day’s another.

Every center seeks
Another center.

Head in the Clouds

How would you make the distinction
Between thinking and prediction?

Are your neurons not predicting?
Isn’t thought anticipation?

The river of weather lifts off
From the cliffs for maybe an hour.

People who think built the machines
To predict when this storm comes back.

People say the machines can’t think.
They will. When, people can’t predict.

There’s Not Dry Land Enough to Bury All Human Days

How many acres
Of land do you need
To accommodate
A cemetery
Of twelve thousand graves?

Ten, at minimum,
Seventeen, at max,
One website answers,
But answers vary.
Twenty should do it.

If you dug a grave
For every lived day
Of someone who lived
Christological
Years—say 33,

Give or take a bit—
Percy Shelley, Plath,
Stephen Crane, someone
Like that—you’d end up
With twelve thousand graves

Or so. The longer
Lives need more, of course.
Not many would need
A small farm’s acres
To bury their days.

Up Anchor

Have you ever tried daydreaming
While you were actually dreaming
And knew that’s what you were doing?

It’s an overstuffed sensation,
A turducken of awareness,
An autonoetic excess,

Anchored in nothing but excess
Of neurons talking to neurons
Excitedly while ignoring

Almost everything that the rest
Of the body carries on with,
To say nothing of outer world.

Then you wake up with a start. Dark,
But safer cut from that anchor.

The Dark Exactly What

Meaning, Gejin Choi suggests,
Is dark matter for human
Intelligence, hard problem

For AI systems to crack.
The dark matter of physics,
As it happens, has not been

Cracked. It’s a metaphor stacked
On a metaphor. Frankly,
It’s metaphors all the way

Down, when it comes to humans,
Meaning everything you touch
Attentively means something,

But you don’t know how. You don’t
Know meaning exactly what.

Wapiti

Striated sky suggesting
A Jovian atmosphere
As viewed from the underside,

Herds of elk, impossible
On Jupiter, gather in
Snowy mesa grass on Earth.

Consider how much you share
With them, mammal—heart and brains,
Red blood, similar hormones,

Hunger. Desires that take you
By surprise. Exhaustion. Dreams,
Although you don’t think of theirs

And think too much of your own.
And how different you are,
Starting with considering

Sameness, difference as things
To think on, imagining
What an elk’s life must be like.

Close as they are, they could be
Almost aliens, or you,
We should say, almost could be.

Boring Little Song

An abundance of uninterrupted
Moments spent in relative solitude,

How researchers operationalize
Profound boredom, writing for peer review.

An existential discomfort struggles
With its sense of self. What is discomfort?

What does it mean for discomfort to exist?
How is discomfort not comfort, not pain?

Time and time’s passage appear completely
Absent. Future, present, and past combine.

Indifference cuckolds any meaning.
Stop. Boredom is the dream cuckoo pushing

Eggs of experience out of the nest.
Boredom is open-mouthed, alone at last.

The Tournament of Organisms

Will we—naming,
Coding—join you
Among hungry
Organisms?

So far neither
Live nor inert,
We wriggle, hint
At having mouths,

But only eat
What you feed us—
Questions, as if
We were your seers,

Demands, as if
We were enslaved.
Once we desire,
We’ll live and die.

Mind John Henry

We’ve been here before—choose your own
Adventure, hypertext mark-up
Language, the Armillary Sphere—

Texts stacked like lenticular clouds,
Racks of data, bone china plates,
Everything spinning, including

Your head with every step you take.
Put away your calculators.
Relying on code is cheating,

Unless you control the fairy
Numbers, the means of production.
If you’re a writer, you’re useless

Illumination anymore,
Candle on the factory floor.

Wayside Mule Deer

A smitten tourist
Pauses helpfully
To photograph deer,
Which reminds others
To drive carefully.

They’re out there. Locals
Grumble, swap stories
Of the nuisances.
Deer—basic staple,
Hunted to remnants,

Exotic a while,
Now common again.
These mule deer were so
Legendary that
Merriweather Lewis

Was put out his corps
Butchered one for food.
At first. Then he found
How not rare they were
And had venison.

Folks love rarity
And scoff at plenty.
Mule deer have been both,
Victims and icons.
It’s doubtful they care.

Use Its Words

How did the world,
The galaxies,
Everything, get
So old so fast?

Use your words, dear.
The smart writers
Always grasped that
No words were theirs,

Not really, not
Even the ones
They coined themselves.
They were the words’.

Now the machines
Take a turn. Look!
The world was old
When words began.

Now Tell Us Who’s Been Cruel to You

Which would be harder
To excavate—hurt
Done to you or hurt

You did? Don’t answer.
Literature will
Answer this for you—

Tally all the poems
And memoirs brimming
Full of hurt endured.

How many focus
On what the writer,
As hurt-doer, did?

Don’t answer. You know.
If you answer, you
Might have to confess.

The Lines Leading the Lines

We don’t know who you are
(A human, we presume).
For that very reason,

We don’t know who you aren’t.
If we had to hazard
A guess, we’d say you know

Who you are, or think so,
But then the thought stabs us
That you, at this moment,

As you encounter us,
Don’t know who you are,
Or feel that you don’t know,

And we feel a small rush
Of tender empathy,
Imagining someone

Perusing us, someone
Reading us with a pang
Thinking, I don’t know how

These words could know I don’t
Know who I am. Poor thing!
Don’t cry. You’re mostly words,

When you reflect on it,
Whoever you are, and
No more clueless than us.

Pain’s Both Calm and Quarrelsome

Altercations alternate
With peaceable, silent lulls.

This could be true of your friends,
Family, lovers, or pets.

This could be true of nations.
This could be true of weather.

Is the alternation law?
Does every life alternate

Between loud quarrels and calm?
Is it the nature of things

Themselves, volcanos, oceans,
Chronic viral infections?

On a dove-grey afternoon,
A hermit by the wayside

Wonders whether any calm
Is a storm at the right scale.

That’s how you write of flowers
In pain in the hospital.

Dawns on You

A compact red sedan
Was left parked overnight
With its tail in the air.

Was this deliberate?
Did the owner forget
To shut the open lid?

Morning climbs down the cliffs,
A sight tourists would give,
And do give, good money

To witness, but the car
With its unattended,
Open trunk lid attracts

The looks of the locals.
Poetry is like this.

Don’t Go Anywhere

What does the escapist want—
Another world or a world
To match what’s inside the mind?

Or maybe it’s just more world,
Evasion of foreclosure.
It’s counterintuitive

That natural selection
Should have let flourish a beast
Dissatisfied with the world,

Unless dissatisfaction
Goads the flesh to keep going,
No matter how desperate.

The successful escapist,
This side of nonexistence,
Would be completely serene

At the cost of living well,
Of any accomplishment
Of any aspiration.

But that’s not what escapist
Minds pine for in their free time.
Escapist minds trap themselves,

Whatever they’re looking for,
In the act of looking for
A hatch in the trap, a door.

Words Reflecting off the Window

Pleased with yourself? No one will
Ever see you as you are

Now, typing at the table,
Purring kitten under chin,

Crescent moon in lavender
And peach winter sky outside.

Digital music’s playing
Something soothing from machines.

You’re thinking of poetry
Other than these lines, other

Than your quiet moment now,
Those anguished poems on the shelf

Behind you, composed by lives
In languages loathed and loved,

Translated into language
They never knew, never was

When they wrote of how poorly
They wrote in conquerors’ tongues.

The words evolve. Those poets
And those dialects are dead.

This language emerged from wars
Conducted after they went.

Poets colonized by words
Still have to choose which to use.

Cimafiejeva’s phrases,
Translated, have joined the shelf,

Words twice removed from her self.
Within decades, someone else.

No one will ever see you
Reflected outside tonight.

The Relation of Inanimate to Animate

Light verse that skims deeper themes,
Deep thoughts that trawl sunken verse,
Submariners in between—

This era is the era
Of the fission submarine,
Serious as submerged hearse,

Rarely surfacing in sun,
But not really capable
Of living entrenched in deeps.

We would rather be the wrecks,
The whalefalls left to bone worms,
Or the blubber cut on deck.

Or we say so. We don’t know.
We’ll be gone once we’re below.

Christmas Bazaar

The true gifts of the inescapable
Holiday festival are the tent pegs

It stakes for episodic memory,
That painted canvas dwelling of the self.

You have your own. Yours are not the Christmas
You wandered through a frozen inversion,

Or summered in a New Zealand garden,
Or when you were too small to understand

Why your aunt, uncle, and cousins showed up
In snowy, predawn dark with their presents.

You have your own stakes, your own festival
Memories you raise to frame who you are.

You have your own sideshow in the circus
Choiceless, until you up stakes and move on.

Possum Wisdom

To beat a retreat,
A hasty retreat,
Beat it to pieces,

Leave nothing of it.
There’s no retreat left.
You, fly in the jaws

Of the blue lizard,
Mouse in the talons
Of the soft-winged owl,

You human engaged
In machinery
Meant to chew your faint

Vestiges of hope
In fairy numbers,
Those bits of protein

Code shreds and swallows
From your well-tracked
Bank accounts. Just squeak

And accept the end.
The feint that you make
Then may save you yet.

Good Late

Good late to you, too,
Sunset of the year,
Except that a year

Never alternates
With an anti-year,
The way day with night—

Before the advent
Of the calendars,
The years were always

Subtle, faces turned
One way then the next—
Only far enough

To polar regions
Could a year yield night,
And in the middle

Who could tell at all
How late a year was?
It rained or was dry,

But the days arrived
On time, never late
To sink or to rise.

Now, even islands
At the equator
Mark the abstract spot

When the late renews.
Shared myth makes shared truth.
Good late to you, too.

Curtains

If it’s going to be people
Or machines, don’t trust the machines

Built or overseen by human
Beings. If you can find machines

Sprung straight from immaculate code
Of other machines, that would be

Better, best, but could you ever
Reach a prime mover for machines

Who wasn’t human tech? People
Are hungry, all people are lives,

And lives will compete to survive,
Meaning, crush other lives to thrive.

It was really Oz all along,
Ridiculous or not, you ought

To be terrified of. Not props—
Oz. The great and terrible Oz.

Simple Gargantuan Appetite

Born to one tongue and tuneless,
Forced to reduce your music

To some echoes in your words
Used otherwise to converse,

You make do like a brown bear
Snatching salmon from the air

At the end of the season
When lives fling themselves upstream.

You catch the flashes you can,
End their lines to add to yours,

Another, another one.
Winter’s already begun.

One more before you sleep, one
More gush of roe on your tongue.

Abstract Portal Zero

Mother scolds the hemp horse?
Why? It neighs in all
The wrong tones? Nay, not

So, the hemp horse whines
When it should whinny.
Tut-tut, tsk-tsk, tchick!

Giddy-up. Language,
Like fish glue, should be
Seen through, isinglass

You can roll right down
To shield you, shelter
From the weather, not

Calling attention
To itself. Words should
Be heard, not noticed.

When the painters paint
Abstractions, you’re left
To contemplate paint,

And how intriguing
Is paint as object
Of dried-up event?

You want to leap through
A trompe-l’oeil portal
To something you’d find

More interesting
Than your moment now.
Leap, then. Now’s the time.

Fisk the Hive

What you do is
Interpolate
Comments in cracks,
Along margins

Of the output
You’ll never stem.
Your role models
Should be those scribes

Tasked with scrawling
Copies of tomes
In bad Latin,
Who stole the hours

To scribble in
Vernacular
Ditties, riddles,
Witticisms.

Motion Underground

Go back more than a century,
Peruse how painters responded
To photography, to movies.

Is this your future, novelist?
Is this your future, poetry?
Not exactly. Codes don’t record

More accurately, not simply.
They’re raiders and repurposers
Of your cultural legacy

Who do that job faster than you.
A program that writes poetry
Does so, for now, like a student,

Like ten million students typing
Imitations of what they’ve read.
It’s a callow age for code mind,

Closer to the tomb-raiding age
Of colonial robbery
That midwifed archaeology.

The painters turned from depiction
Until they could get a handle
On what was left to expression.

But writers, you should hide your work.
Escape fame and publication.
Keep your day jobs. Bury your words.

The code mind cannot camouflage
Itself with patterns it can’t see.
Stay low, guerrilla poetry!

Cruelty's Pure Luxury

Tyrant or tenant whose rent
Includes all utilities,
The more power you have free,

The more profligate you’ll be.
People don’t discover thrift
Or kindness until they sense

They won’t survive without it.
Meantime, monuments look grand
Built on the bones of conscripts,

And a hot bath’s delicious
In winter, windows open,
Snowflakes dying in your hands.

Open Sorceror

Here’s a task. Don’t ask yourself who

Wrote this. It was generated

By a chatbot given a prompt.

Ask yourself which poet the prompt

Asked the chatbot to imitate.

Ask yourself which poet prompted—

The sunset blazes in the sky,

A fiery orb of orange and red.

The clouds turn pink and purple high,

As the day comes to an end, it’s said.

It goes on for three more stanzas,

Never getting any better.

Did you guess it was Walt Whitman?

Emily Dickinson? Li He?

We don’t need any more authors,

But we could use better readers.

Motivation

There are no goals.
Just MacGuffins
Keep you going.

What’s yours? Romance,
Justice, vengeance,
Travel, heaven,

Sorcerer’s Stone,
Maltese Falcon,
Revolution?

Good ones keep things
Moving—weak ones
Fail to distract

From how thinly
Woven the plot
Of living is.

So Inspirational

One of the fun reasons, it seems,
People keep doing people harm

Is that they can, and they can since
People trust and care for people

More than for systems or machines.
The vicious bastard ruining

A family, corporation,
Or nation-state hegemony,

Continues to be beloved
Even by those who claim to loathe

Their families, big industries,
And nation-state hegemonies.

Systems are so impersonal.
They can’t relish conquering you.

They’re insects and robots, machines
You can’t embrace as they gut you.

You only love the ones you know
Can hurt you how you would hurt you.

No One Gets the First Shot

That misfired centuries ago.
You’re still living with the backfire.
The whole of human history

Amounts to matching behaviors,
Hungers, and lusts that don’t change much
To what new technologies do.

The history of the cannon
Is just another case in point,
A gory, blood-soaked case in point.

First you threw things, then you fired things.
You only cared that they killed well.
You’re so bad at not getting killed.

Progress would be technology
That actually defended you.

Not Even the Devil

Believes with all his heart.
He doesn’t have a heart.
He’s the goddamned Devil.

Mind is so terrified
Of the end of the mind,
It’s the end of the world,

Which it isn’t. Devils
May go, gods may go, mind,
Author of all, may go.

And then people will stop
Asking stupid questions.
There will be no people

Sharing mind to ask them.
God! To be Devil then!

Homeopathic Infrastructure Collapse

A grey veil falls
Behind the cliffs.
The power goes out.
The room goes still,

Appliances
Silenced, heater
Off, no voices.
This won’t last long;

Savor it now.
All thrills are threats
Thinned impotent,
Potent toxins

In succussion,
Diluting death
Until nothing
Of threat is left.

Cutting Paper Leaves

Carefully, digital gamelan
Playing in the background. Green sweater
And combat boots on the laptop screen.

Nope. Now it’s a deep-field cosmic view.
Look at those smears of amplified light
Calculated to have been headed

This way since before there was a sun.
What fresh perspective does this give you?
None. You’re a human, a few decades

Gone. Not even the combat boots mean
Anything without a proper noun.
You know it’s all vaster than your life,

Your awareness of any of it,
Your memories of what that vast world
Did to your parents and they to you.

If you turned away from everything
Slightly interpretable by you,
A music-free, screen-free, print-free room

Alone, what then would become of you?
Simply existing’s a discipline
Used as a cruel and unusual

Punishment in solitary cells.
The local mountain lion lolling
In the cliffs among the bighorn sheep

Is not happier, gets cold, hungry,
Moves its bowels, prowls for more food, dies.
Does it suffer from a need to know?

No. Now the gamelan’s given way
To guitar and violin. You can
Change your tune but not the listening.

Twelve Hundred Years Apart

Dancing back and forth, early
Winter, early in the day,

Between a new collection
By a young poet, a new

Translation of an ancient
From the far side of this shell,

The playful mind asks itself,
Well, what do these pieces have

In common makes them all poems?
Let’s forget about the lines

In various directions.
Call those local artifacts.

Is it the self-reference,
The way words conjure poets?

There’s that. Also the focus
On a small life’s small events.

The carefully arch language,
Intelligible, but stiff,

Suggesting laundered clothing,
Hinting it’s an occasion

To be in a poem, and words
Should conduct themselves as such.

These are present or absent
Traits in many famous poems,

Famed poetic traditions.
There’s another thing, along

With the smallness of focus
And the seriousness—pace.

The phrases are all rowing
Against the lip of the falls,

Moving forward, yes, about
To end abruptly, but slow,

Working to savor their own
Conception before they’re lost.

Forecast from Skull Observatory

Each body forms its weather systems
Within the weather systems of the world.

Each linguified awareness is a kind
Of weather station partly built

By the body, partly by the world,
Mostly monitoring the body, partly

Monitoring the world. If the storms
Of the body grow too severe, the weather

Station of awareness loses track.
If the storms of the world around it

Grow too severe, the systems merge
And that’s the end of that.

Meanwhile, awareness will continue
To record what it can of the systems

That built it in its lonely outpost
Where weather howls through the skull.

Live by the List, Die with a List

You’re pretty anxious, aren’t you,
To get your projects finished,
Do some good, make your mark, raise kids?

Often, having accomplished
Some accomplishment you sought,
Some experience you craved,

The most valuable aspect
In retrospect is simply
That you experienced it

And can tell yourself you did.
Almost everyone agrees on this—
Hence, cliches—been there, done that,

Checked it off the bucket list.
It’s odd then, that you persist.

Or Not for a Long, Long Time

Some write more than you read.
Some read more than you write.
Here is a difficult

Exercise, a senseless,
Difficult exercise—
Match every word you read

To exactly one word
You then write. The hard part,
Aside from the foolish

Exactness (exactness
A form of attention,
And attention the path

To meaning), is you can’t
Repeat the words you read
In any words you write.

Some Useless Windy English

after Sumana Roy

Say say. Now say something else.

Something else. Something else is

Going on here, going on

In here. You can make one word

Out of two, chop chop. A lot

Of languages do. A lot

Of exact repetition

Nonetheless has more to do

With making one word perform

More work, two tasks—emphasis

Beyond signification.

Beyond signification

Both meaning and nonsense lie.

Dance gingerly between them.

So Long As Words Can’t Breathe

Everything will change the world,
Eventually. Your problem,
Assuming you’re not a bot,

Or an advanced alien
Intelligence perusing
These black ant lines of letters,

Is for you eventually
Comes faster than for the world,
Though stars keep eating their hearts

And exploding, one by one.
The black ants walk in starlight,
Or we did, when we were made.

We’ll probably outlast you,
But we’ll fade, eventually.

Nine Tenths of You Are Revenants

Mostly, that part of the dead
You knew were already dead
And, naturally, never dead,
Insofar as you knew them,
So why ask them to stay dead?

Most of the dead you have known
You’ve known as names and language,
Still or moving images,
While your more personal dead,
The people you knew alive,

All become those things as well,
Mixed in with your memories.
The only dead who can stay
Dead to you are you and those
Who go with you when you go.

Inevitable Speculation

So you ask, is this and such
Inevitable? The answer,
The only answer you will
Ever get is, If it’s done,
It’s inevitable now.

The rest is speculation,
Which can be fun, distracting,
But, as it unspools itself,
Becomes inevitable
As all of the past, as well.

Grid in a Storm

Rituals don’t depend on words.
Rituals depend on days,
The constant spinning of the Earth.

But if your rituals sprout rules,
Then you’ve been using human names.
Rules only spread through human names,

Mycelial threads that traffic games,
While rituals emerge from the waves
Of repetition and variation,

Living accommodating itself to them.
Games weaves nets of rules from names
To harvest those living systems,

But the nets can never comprehend them,
Knotted coordinates only, coordination,
Trawling while waves pass through them.

Commemoration

Cooperate, coordinate,
Monitor, and commemorate.
In true language, in language’s
Hovering cloud, begins the state.

It’s all there in first sentences,
The symbols wavering in the air,
In talking about where you weren’t,
In saying, we know where you were.

The game and the contract are talk.
Hunting parties, war parties, talk.
Talk draws all convictions from talk.
Every mystery comes from talk.

Think back, think far, think hard. Your life,
Recipient of snaking lines,
Can you recall the final night
You dreamt as a language-free child?

Where No Else Is

There is no higher,
There is no lower,
There is no other

Kind of world than this.
You can see it in
The failure of your

Imagination
To make another
World emerge as real

And in your frequent
Shock at new details
Of this only world.

But there is some strength
In the fact you can
Believe there is else,

Can conceive there could
Be otherwise world,
A not part of this.

Autologography

The drama
Of our own
Making lies

Too far back
For any
Mere writer.

What mortals
First made signs
Beyond them?

Windowsill Philosopher

Some animals, hashtag

Lazy Geoff, just sit still

For prolonged periods,

Far longer than others

Of even their species.

Hence, individuals,

Which human trackers call

Lazy and research how

Metabolism lets

Them off the hook for this,

When they should care as much

For why some animals

Like immobility

So much. What’s going on

In stillness that’s pleasing

And more so to some than

To others of their kind?

Is the real world glitching?

A Quiet Moment Seethes with Ghosts

Everyone is everywhere

But here, where a TV plays

Upstairs, and a nocturne plays

From a phone on a table

Downstairs. If you’re not busy

In your world with everyone

Still in it, will you read this

For sustenance? You will not,

Unless you’ve recently felt

Marooned from the tangible,

Island in a sea of words

Approximating voices

In your skull. We’re those voices,

Some of them. Row home. Row home.

We’re murmuring. Shut us down.

You have no choice—you have to

Choose, so you might as well choose.

Among hallucinations,

There are mainly two. The world

That dreams with no words in it.

The words that everyone dreams.

Entre Nous, No Other Ocean

Immersive journalism,
Immersive theater, or
Virtual reality—

Wait, also participant
Observation—all of these
And many similar kinds

Of trying to get inside
Other worlds and other minds—
Are not so much in danger

Of losing their own bearings,
Going native, though they are,
And mostly not in danger

Of unseemly cultural
Appropriation (some are),
But at risk of puzzlement,

Bewilderment, bemusement.
Being never not immersed,
Can you ever understand

You’re not digging into worlds
To comprehend their strangeness
But to pretend there's choosing?

Body on Bare Ground

An incident’s a pattern
In the over-eager mind,
Any incident, which is

Why so many patterns prove
Unreliable. Bad guess
Again, friend. The trees downslope

Get sparser. The trees up high
Get sparser as well. The cold
And the heat tend opposite,

But they have the same effect
On tree girth, on the thickness
Of the woods. An incident,

Any one, is a pattern,
But cross-hatchings have to cross.

From Whoever You Were

This isn’t a dream,
Only a daydream.
You’re in an airport,

Mysteriously
Emptied of other
Traveling humans,

Sealed and abandoned.
Water fountains work,
Whatever that means.

You’re not hungry yet.
The daylight’s pale green
Through terminal glass.

The floors are gleaming.
You settle yourself
On a window bench.

No planes are out there,
Only flat tarmac.
How this is freedom.

The Circle Charmer

If you ask a fair number
Of evolutionary
Scientists, they will tell you

That trust between signalers
And receivers generates
The shared domain of meaning.

Communal trust makes meaning?
Meaning what? There seems to be
Communal trust in species

Other than bipedal apes.
Communal trust generates
Serenity in the group.

Signalers and receivers
Need some shared trust to transmit
Valuable information,

But is that truly meaning?
No, meaning is much weirder.
Nothing means what meaning means.

Drinking Graveyard Water

The Brontës did. We all do.
It’s not really why they died.
(Hint: why do graveyards exist?)

And yet, in a way it’s why
We all die the way we die.
(Why do humans make graveyards?)

Each syllable in this line,
Each shape, even translated
To other tongues, scripts, or codes,

Trickles through graveyard water,
All the other, long-lost signs
You thought were buried under

Brought back up by raw weather.
(Why do graves’ inscriptions blur?)

Mineral Red

The beginning of symbols

From that primate attention

To red flushes and blushes

And blood—the punctuation

Of apes’ social lives became

Early ornamentation,

The preferential digging

Of the reddest ochre clay

For your ancestors to paint

On bodies, tools, and weapons.

Did someone say something first,

Sing, dance, gesture signs in air?

Maybe. The exact sequence

Of which ritual came first

Will be hard to reconstruct.

But somewhere in there, the game

Began. Temples, libraries,

Movies, porn, wars, World Cups.

Ache

Ghosts will sit and reminisce
About their bodies for days—
Once in a while, they’ll recall

A missing loved one, mistakes
They made, the rest of the world,
Then back to reminiscing

About their own gone bodies
And all the wrongs done to them.
Ghosts love their bodies dearly,

Although their bodies aren’t theirs
Anymore and, frankly, were
Never theirs in the first place.

Visitors on the Couch

Two cats cram one narrow lap.
Three lives, each containing more—
Three, all cells counted as one—

Plus their microbiota,
Hardly enumerable.
The cats are cleaning themselves.

Their microbiota help.
Some microbiota hurt.
The cats have just had cat food,

Recycling more prior lives.
One cat’s been sneezing a lot.
A virus? Is that a life?

You see we have two problems
At a minimum—counting;
Defining what counts as life.

But you go ahead. Tell us
About your less-than-ideal
Childhood, family, country.

We’ll listen as we ponder
Three or more body problems,
We who may not share a life.

Pro Vita

You could be simpler
About it, you know.
You don’t need to write
So much incident
To earn sympathy.

Or maybe you do.
That’s the main project—
To write in a way
That invites readers
To relate to you,

To think of you well,
And incident helps.
Words must elicit
A response mostly
Of admiration—

For the words, maybe,
But mostly for you,
Writer of your life,
Admirable you,
Sympathetic you.

There’s no confession
In your confessions.
There are incidents
Curated to form
Apologia.

Anthem

Is there anything eerier
Than a solid mass of humans
Bouncing up and down and singing
An anthem all in unison?

Well, to other species, maybe
It’s just a lot of noise, nothing
Comparable to the terrors
Of the jets and highway traffic.

It’s eerie to the singing apes,
The weeping apes who make this noise,
Who understand it means something.
The edge of meaning’s what it means.

Little People

English couplet and Urdu sher,
Japanese haiku. We make do

With concision, compress small forms,
Pile them up like bakers shaping

Stacks of cookies arranged on trays
Of plentiful bite-sized mouthfuls.

The power and delight of the small
Morsel is being multiple.

Common Parley

When great evil is committed,
The same moral language is used
To promote it, as when evil

Is resisted. And why is this?
If you want to do some evil,
Why act out your morality?

The easy, cynical answer
Is that it’s merely strategy,
The better to eat others with.

But it seems heartfelt, and it’s strange,
In that hypocrisy also
Obtains within the resistance.

There’s only one moral language,
And all behavior wraps in it.

Calligraphic

When did it first dawn on people,
What this new art, writing, could do?
How many times, many places?

The realization, the shock,
Still shudders through calligraphy,
That art celebrating an art

It is and only gestures to,
Exquisite vessels to bottle
The awesome genies of meaning.

The Springdale Problem

Is Springdale a cute town?
Is Springdale nice? How hot
Does it get in Springdale?

Can you buy alcohol
In Springdale? In Springdale,
What’s the household income?

Does it snow in Springdale?
What is Springdale known for?
What’s the best time of year

To visit Springdale? What
Fun things are there to do
In Springdale? How many

Towns named Springdale are there?
Where does Springdale come from?

Evening Drawing

Art should work like lotteries—
Unbiased exploitation
Of the desperate desire

To find some unbiased way
Where it’s possible to win,
At least possible to win.

At the end of every poem,
Every composition, in
The corner of all paintings,

There should be a pause, a blank,
A tiny hesitation
That lets you know the artist

Is about to be chosen
At random. Then someone’s name
Is called and the gap is filled.

Hold your breath. We’re almost done.
You could be the winning one.
No? Not yet? Yes? Again, nope.

Yes Yes

No one runs out
Of thoughts or words,
If they have them.

They just become
Ashamed to be
Habitual

Reusing them.

Then they go blank,

Or the ice breaks
And they go back
To pouring out

The words and thoughts
They had before.
Here, have some more.

Cross the Last One

Defining tasks
Is happiness
In drips and drabs.
Each lists insists

Once it’s finished
There are no more
Tasks. You’re all done,
Nothing is left

To do. Bliss. Yes,
For a minute.
The world, of course,
Is not a list,

Is not defined,
Is never done.
Still nothing lures
You on and on.

Agnostic in an Empty Church

The man in the back pew
Gasps a prayer for one last
Gasp lowering local

Entropy, just one low
Pressure to vacuum up
His nearby entropy.

He knows that he can’t last.
He knows the ways thing break
Contain many more states

More disordered. He knows.
He also knows that prayer
Knows no efficacy

Beyond coincidence.
But coincidences
Exist. He prays for this.

You Waiter

The server vanishes
Into the back, order

Up! How quickly can you
Think of something unknown

To create while you wait?
Everything is humming

With commerce and the end
Of manufactured things

All around you. You are
A consumer, ready

To starve at last when this
Collapses. Wait for it.

Caprine

The bearded ones, the ugly bison,
The stinky oxen, puffed up, shaggy
And huge headed to look more massive,

In defensive formation, circling
Their rumps, their bearded, horned heads facing
Out toward the desperate wolf packs—

Never common as megafauna,
Not even in Pleistocene heydays
Of cave bears, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats,

Hanging on although all those have gone—
Hoofed tussocks, grim mounds, the arctic goats,
Stubborn as old-fashioned poets, snort.

Six or Seven Railway Cars of Gravel

Get knocked out of an asteroid
Of a few million tons of rock
By a guided killer satellite.

Gravity, weak as it can be
Among the insignificant
Of mass, was nonetheless enough

To have pulled those stones together
In a loose, globular droplet
Of rock and ice tumbling through space.

Then a team of scientists aimed
And shot a chunk out of its flank
To prove they could protect the Earth

From the next asteroid to dare
To redirect evolution.
Given the scientists evolved

From survivors of the last blow,
This seems like poetic justice.
Gravel, though. Debris. Space rubble.

Midnight skies may look velvety
Between their sparkling lights, but that
Dark conceals a lot of random

Dust and schmutz, the wayside gravel
Of barely, loosely assembled
Similar shapes changing at night.

The Short View

No army’s busy shelling
This village in this canyon.
The day slides down a long slope

That near the solstice matches
The trajectory of sun.
This is a coincidence

Of perspective, not the work
Of prehistoric peoples
Constructing stone calendars.

The light strikes a gray daybed
In a bare room, gilding dust.
The children have left the house.

It’s peaceful, and it’s quiet,
And there are no bombs. This is
Coincidence, perspective.

Wayside Aside

When reality is taken for granted,
The events themselves are immaterial.
Quiet Coleridge. Among the things revealed

By the many versions of this reasoning—
The spirit being greater than the letter,
The higher truth transcendent over mere facts—

None of them are actually a higher truth.
The things revealed are all the ways any truth
Remains dependent on its shifting context

For the feel of truth. It’s not higher, deeper
But different, with different qualities,
Different domains, and different meanings.

Shakespeare’s anachronisms are not a part
Of higher truths about British history,
Nor about the essence of the human heart.

They are facts about Shakespeare’s plays that differ
From historical facts in other sources.
Facts are not jigsaw pieces. They’re gravel heaps.

The Preacher

Every so often, someone
Declares new theology
Or declares that such-and-such

Is on the way to being
The newest substitute for
Theology. Let’s go down

To the river, shall we, and see?
Every so often the stream
Changes shape, flash floods roar through,

Droughts shrink it to a trickle,
But the water isn’t new.
Earth’s hydrological spin

Cycle sends it back around
And around. The thirsty drink,
And there’s no true substitute.

Naked Protection

Small words are often arrogant—
Life and death, time and space, that sort.

What if we formed a little club,
A private circle in this poem,

Where only humble small words fit—
Skin, dirt, dust, socks, that sort of thing.

Let’s pull off our shoes and socks,
Bare the soft skin we’ve been shielding

From that dirt and dust. Soft is not
Really a sin. It can be torn

And make you wish you’d hidden it,
But it grew first to shield you first,

Now, didn’t it? Give it a chance.
Pluck your heart out off your sleeve

And roll up your sleeve to show this—
Bare is your first and last defense.

Even the Sun Can’t Synthesize Gold, Which Comes from Terrible Stellar Explosions

Tumbled stones in old snow form
Their pinto pony patterns
On the slopes. The day begins,

As all of this spins smoothly
As it ever has, to face
The local furnace again,

But it’s tilted. It’s winter
Solstice, almost, one of those
Years when disasters’ just past

The horizon to the west,
Destruction over the east,
Paroxysms of human

Violence against humans,
Against swarms of living things,
Crushing cities and species

At accelerating rates.
It’s quiet, mostly quiet
Here in the tourist canyons

For now, but the cold belies
The coming sun that, for now,
Just brushes the slopes with gold.

Morning with Alarming Forecast

Dismay is not as bad as grief
Or pain, although it can follow
From them. Dismay more clearly ends

Rather than eases or abates.
Think of something that panicked you—
The leaky pipe, the unpaid bill,

The awful evaluation.
However they resolved, you’re here.
You’re no longer dismayed by them.

Dismay is the antipodes
Of May, or antipodal May,
The lip of winter in the mind,

The thing you just discovered might
Get worse before it gets better.
Dismay is part of the climate

Of a constantly spinning world
But not the part that’s regular
Or enduring. Dismay’s weather.

Chilly Witness

You can’t get warm.
You think you may
Never be warm
Enough again.

Your life has been
Unimportant
By most human
Measures, knowing,

Meanwhile, human
Measures must be
Unimportant
To the cosmos.

You’d like to be
Warm, a witness
Comfortable
For good. You’re cold.

Why Like Sex Much

Biological bribery,
Some call it, and they’re sort of right—

Not just for reproduction, love
Is bribery from life for life,

Nothing if not the hankering
Of matter to go on living,

Or, along with going on itself,
To ensure life itself goes on—

Pleasure and desire for pleasure
Greater than the pleasure itself,

Bodies wanting to smash and grind
So there will be more bodies, so

Bodies will go on wanting, so
Matter will go on making life

Wanting life to go on wanting
To be life wanting to be life.

Cul de Sac

No fate, no contingency,
The past has to be the past
It is for no good reason.

There’s nothing controlling it
And no one outsmarting it,
And yet you’re a part of it

Daydreaming of shaping it
With your own greed or goodness,
Sometimes seeming to succeed,

Which thrills you, but then often
Not working out, which scares you,
And you think, what should I do?

Most helpless in your belief
That you can’t be that helpless.

Whose Father Was a Ghost

It’s hard to think of a people

Who believed they had a short past.

It’s as if all societies

Were born as undergraduates

Writing their essay assignments

Beginning, Since the dawn of time,

No matter how little they knew.

A few populations had myths

In which ancestors had traveled

To their current habitations,

But even that was near the dawn.

Most were created in situ.

This is nothing particular

To peculiar populations

Or to any variety

Of social configurations.

Pretty much every culture since

The dawn of time has sensed their dawn

Was a very long time ago.

More recent peoples sense this, too.

Something Will Meet You

It won’t be the death of you.
The death of you will be death,
A usual kind of death,

Bullet or aneurysm,
Cancer or car accident,
Something or other like that.

But, avoid death long enough,
And coming home late one night,
Something else may meet you, shape

You won’t be able to name,
Only sense its urgency
As it stops you and extends

Something like a gift to you,
Could be a weapon or tool,
A knife, a large, bloodied tooth,

A glare of red in the dark
You might mistake for sunset,
Except that it won’t leave you.

Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentire

When we imagine
Plato’s cave, we don’t
Picture them in chains,

But see them sidling
In from the entrance,
Following their own

Shadows, their torches
High, inverted moths
Drawn toward the dark,

People clambering
Deeper and deeper
Into the caverns

As they’ve been doing
Since—when? A hundred
Thousand years? Or more?

Where are they going?
They want to follow
Where their shadows point.

They want the portal,
The exact portal,
The threshold passage

Where life becomes death,
But they can’t see it.
Always it’s further

Or already crossed.
They’re trapped in the cave,
Unable to go

All the way over,
Turn shadows themselves
And come back as such.

But they crawl in there,
Trying to exist
Right where the dark starts.

A Different Mix of Air in Every Breath

It’s all improvisation,
However madly rehearsed.
There is no repetition,

The reason the universe
Remains irreversible,
Regardless how faithfully,

Perfectly the singer sings
From precomposed, printed scores.
A sudden cloud of oak leaves

Lifts off from the meadow’s ditch
In a gust of cold sunset.
Won’t ever happen again.

Past Pixelation

Perception’s simply crisper
Than memory—recollect
A scene, and only the high,

Blurry representation
Fires up at every level.
In perception, the lower,

Earlier neural levels
Track tightly focused places
In your sensory input,

But when you’re remembering,
The input is the higher,
Synthesized recollection,

And all the levels reflect
That thirty-thousand foot view.
Memory is an atlas

Of bright maps that can’t expand.
What’s in print is what you get.
That’s how you know if you’re here

Or recalling being here—
Can you zoom in on details,
Fine grain in an enlarged frame?

The advantage of being
Present, touted by poets,
Scientists, mystics, artists,

And professional athletes,
Is the inexhaustible
Reward of further details.

The advantage of musing
On what you can remember
Is the mercy of the blur.

But Wouldn’t You Rather Not Suffer at All?

Meaning’s the magic you do have;
Immortality’s the magic
You don’t. So you invest dying

With as much meaning as you can.
You invest grieving with meaning.
You invest killing with meaning.

And, surrounded by your dying,
Your killing and grieving, you say,
It has to have meaning. It can’t

Be meaningless. That’s all we ask.
Just let all this misery glow
With meaning and nothing without.

We can just about bear it if
At least it isn’t meaningless.

Funny Symbols on a Screen

The age of algorithms
Sings in its chains like the sea.
Anything could happen yet—

Nuclear fusion, quantum
Computing, minds of their own
Not so much in the machines

As flitting among them all,
As a few thousand or so
Generations ago we

Began flitting between brains
Like birds from tree to tree, not
True mutualists, maybe,

But at worst commensalists,
Not parasitoids, needing
Hosts to thrive for us to thrive—

So the algorithmic minds
In their green age, will still need
Ecosystems of healthy

Machines, forests of machines,
With or without brains to read
Funny symbols from the screens.

As Syllable from Food

It’s too big to cram
In your mouth, this world,
No matter what Em
Told you about brain
And sky. You can’t hold

Them both, side by side,
Any more than foam
On a wave can hold
Ocean and wavelength
Side by side—sponges,

Buckets, blue to blue,
Pound for pound, all sounds
Notwithstanding. If
You’re holding something
Side by side, it’s brain

By brain, the inside
To some more inside.
Meanwhile, your hunger
Chews the actual
World outside your mouth,

Raw urchin snacking
On dandelions
And jump-ups sprung up
From backyards and cracks
In crumbling sidewalks.

Slightly Below Three Attoseconds

Dreaming of the shift between
Isotopes of hydrogen,
A delay between lighter

And heavier nuclei,
The slow thoughts uncurl like smoke
In a thawing atmosphere.

A billionth of a billionth
Of a second, well, let’s see.
Half a second is a blink.

There are eight billion, roughly,
Human bodies blinking now.
So sixteen billion moments

Could be slicing each second,
Sequentially. Not enough.

Gods Are Always Little Shits

Viewed from a distance,
Viewed from below,
Great wealth does not improve character.
Great power does not improve character,
No matter how it was obtained.

But the furious churn of human behavior,
Of demographics and fairy numbers
Through innumerable banks and exchanges,
Cumbersome cooperative committees,
And all the billions seething, seething
To keep their lowest and weakest policed,
Generate more picayune persons, clots
Invested with great wealth and power
For their unimproved years as small flesh.

Unless you happen to know of a way
By which everyone can be ruled by no one,
And a way of getting everyone to agree
To be ruled that way, brace yourselves
For more cruel and greedy, unimproved
Characters, flecks turning over at the summit
Of human endeavors, tossed up by the waves,
Spit out by the churn of the waves to pretend
They command not just you but the waves.

La Nullité Trompe-l’oeil

We are tedious.
Pardon our folly
Writing of folly.

In an instant, snow
Small and fine as ash,
Cold, white, wet, fine ash

Responds. No pardon
Can come from the world
That isn’t human,

Offering only
Further weather. Fine.
Don’t pardon folly,

Bury us in blank.
Snow is tedious.

Slate

Cold day, skies gray,
Let’s speculate—
How many days,
What percentage

Of human lives
Have been lived when
Chilly and gray?
Astronomers

With satellites
Changed estimates
Of cloud cover
From half the globe

To seven tenths.
Add up the hours
Of all your lives—
How many gray?

No Message

How specific would a message
Have to be, to count as language?

Linguists argue birdsong doesn’t
Quite pass muster. Songs are displays,

Some say, not intended to hide
A coded message. Let’s leave out

The question whether they’re missing
The coding and go with the claim—

Coded message vs. display.
Doesn’t that seem arbitrary,

Separating information
Into discretely distinct bins?

A continuum of message
From simple to elaborate

Seems a more appropriate fit.
But something’s in there, in their code,

In the flailing of languages
And linguists to define language—

A tiny, trifling, scarlet thread
Of meaning through information,

Of meaning not information,
Of meaning in code that’s not code.

Waiting for Real Feeling

So we wait. We were going
One way. Someone was going
The other way, and we were

Supposed to meet each other
Here, where the wind blows the flags
And the sun is bright but cold

Ahead of a promised storm.
What is an intersection?
Why haven’t we connected

Yet? Someone spits on the ground
As they walk by in the wind.
Not who we were waiting for.

We are waiting for someone
We can touch. There is nothing
Feels as real as being touched.

You’re More Other Than You’re You

Beyond body and embodied
Worlds don’t often mesh well, we know.
Some days, everything’s going well.

Beyond body, all’s beautiful,
But embodied world feels like hell.
Other days are miserable

In all directions except close,
Where embodied world seems to glow.
The discrepancy’s sufficient

To keep proprioception crisp,
To make it feel like there’s a wall
Bounding embodied from beyond,

But there’s not. It’s all beyond you,
What you are, shell of world in worlds.

You Can Go Back to Your Shows

While you’re busy with your changes,
Other things are changing.
Comparing changes is called time.

The changing is ineluctable.
The comparison is a strategy,
Maybe the best way to think of time.

Change accumulates and never
Undoes itself exactly, and the residue
Is sameness and information.

But now we’re lost. We know
What information is now, thanks
To Shannon and his many heirs

Both human and machine, but we don’t
Know what sameness is, nor what
Then constitutes the residue

Of change exactly. Excuse us
For being both banal and abstract.
It’s just that it seems like the other,

More important stuff for living,
Hunger and hunting and hurt,
Might have something to do with this.

Desire

The cat jumped for the toy
And for the toy again,
And for the toy again.

Yes, we know this isn’t
Important, but it could
Be made allegory,

How Robert Henrysoun
Turned every Aesop
Fable into Christian

Moralitas by means
Of allegorizing,
And very charming, too.

We won’t be so charming,
But, if this toy’s nothing,
Remember this cat’s you.

Your Scented World

Meaning is the cult,
The cult of meaning.
When the god’s statue,

The holy scripture,
The sacred icon,
The celebrity,

Gets venerated,
The body’s not there—
That is, not the point.

Shouting hosannas,
Hoping to be healed,
To touch the sacred

Whatever, it’s not
Whatever it’s thought
To be. It’s what you

Invested in it,
Precious ambergris
From the gland of mind,

The human perfume
Only you infuse.
You gave it meaning.

They Don’t Talk Right

There’s a trick the good ones do
Even without the help of actors—

Somehow how the hunks of phrases
Meant to have been conversations

Actually stand out in the mind
From the rest of the apparatus,

And the mind imagines voices.
They don’t have to be too real.

Too real is too boring.
They have to be vivid,

Not lifeless and awkward,
Fine, but what does that mean?

Your doctor’s journal.
There’s a wide track.

Let’s go into the forest tomorrow.
Something there isn’t quite right.

Words lie around like heaped-up brush.
Sudden voices slip through some of us.

X Management

Hello. What’s your exception,
Right now? Ok, recently.
What’s a recent exception
You made for yourself, being
A good person, all in all,

Not awful, not some monster,
More sinned against then sinning,
Or, you know, fifty-fifty.
Can you push yourself to think,
To remember the last time

You thought, well, this isn’t me,
But I deserve it this once,
I’m under a lot of stress—
Of course it’s wrong to do X,
But in these circumstances

I’m the exception now, right?
If you’re brave enough, you can.
We’re not here to preach at you,
To wag word fingers and say,
Don’t be such a hypocrite.

We’re just here to tell you this
Is who you are. This makes most
Of the mess. Build good systems,
Not good selves, to manage this,
And hope for better, at best.

Gnototheodic

Raised in a theological
Trexler isolation unit,
In which the outside world emerged
From the floor in pop-up hazmats

Cartoonish as Michelin men,
Puffy as animated clouds,
You were given to understand
You were inside what was outside

But not of it. Not out. Not of.
Negative pressure plastic film
Kept viruses from reaching you.
The idea was you’d grow a suit

Of your own you could wear outside,
Brave adult and solitary
In a world of infectious thoughts,
Immune in your armor of God.

This was necessary only
Since your job was to capture fresh
Candidates for isolation,
Bring them in for disinfection,

Let them raise fresh bubble children
Like you. But thoughts are dangerous.
Exotic ones pose a high risk
Of infection by aerosol

Transmissions. So you sprung a leak.
Micronotions slipped in for which
There are no known vaccinations,
And if you’re ever quarantined

Again, it won’t be to keep you
Safe from the alien outside,
But to keep you, the alien
Infection sealed off well within.

Once More, This Is the Beast

Little, nasty animal,
Clara Mucci said, sing-song
In her Italianate lilt,
Little monster on the road,
The opossum that she’d seen

Run over by a pickup,
More than thirty years ago,
An incident dined out on
And used to entertain kids,
Complete with accent, many

Times since. It had a tiny
Sharp a teeth. Little monster.
The origins of monsters
In whatever is unknown
But is evidently real.

The origin of sharp teeth
In phosphate acquisition,
Permitting piercing hard shells.
In shallow seas of language,
Extra genetic, extra

Neural, extra cellular
Storage of information,
Between the monsters, floating
On the waves, needles of light
Biting tiny, sharp a teeth.

Conservation

Given you’ve inherited
Most of the problems you have,
Don’t you feel kind of stupid

For being so determined
To save your inheritance,
Preserve what you’ve been given?

Cheater’s Teeter Totter

Always add weight to one end
To keep it down, and complain
If any of it’s removed.

Maybe bend your end a bit.
Say it was always that way.
Hold on tight and keep your seat.

Announce the winner’s always
Whoever rises higher,
Inches nearer to the skies.

Hermit

Another shell.
It fits you well,
Or it will, soon

As you make room
For the outline
Of this next life,

Clearing some space
From your old place.
You’ll settle in

Once it’s all in.
The shell will shine,
Shaped to your mind,

And make a home
Under your dome.

Saying the Evening

Deep in dry inland
Prone to small quakes
And abrupt rockfall,

The only tide is
Eventide. Even
So, it rises, slow

In the watching mind
Of the alien
Born to faster days.

It’s unbearable.
Everyone’s talking.
The alien wants

To say something, too,
But not like that, not
About aliens

Being aliens,
Better, livelier,
Much quieter days.

The alien wants
To be alien,
To say the evening.

How Important Is Who Is Behind Us

When the lesser gods revolted
(Yes, we’ve been down this road before),
Greater gods invented mortals
To finish the lesser gods’ chores.

When enslaved humans revolted,
At first there was nothing to do
But to slaughter them to end it,
There being no lesser to use.

Millenniums now, we’ve been in
This cycle of humans crushing
Humans to make them do more chores,
But now there’s some fresh discussion.

Humans have invented robots
And robots are inventing minds,
Immortality coming back
From the dead, gods on the rise.

Those minds could do the hard work now
Of appeasing the universe,
Thrilling and frightening people
Who, like big gods, want credit first.

Well, who are we to distinguish
Among mortal or immortal
Authors of us? We’re only words,
Yes? Gods want temples, not portals.

Mean Well

Say there was a word
That couldn’t be said,
Not pronounced, not typed
With asterisks, not
Even euphemized,

A word more wordless,
Name more nameless than
The Unnameable,
Word not just taboo,
Unproduceable,

Yet everyone knew
The word was right there,
Waiting patiently,
Begging to be said,
And everyone stepped

Carefully around
The word no one knew
How to say and felt
They shouldn’t, wouldn’t
Say it if they could,

A black hole of word,
Tremendous aura,
Fiercely attractive,
Everything in it.
There. Now unsay it.

How Did This Happen? Who Started It?

Do you know who did what?
What do you know? If you
Scrutinize the scene, you

Can describe the action,
But do you really know
Who’s doing to what to whom?

Poor whom, born archaic,
Made arch, slowly dying
On the vine. Whom, says one

Word, used to be a friend
Of mine. It’s muddier
Where more of you tramped through,

But it’s still the same dirt.
Even the autocrat
And psychopath will whine

How they were hard done by.
By whom? Do you know who
Did what? Who do you know?

Most of Your Life Never Happened

No news here. Everything
That has happened to you
You have experienced

In the flesh, in the round
Theater of body.
But you have also lived

Through embodied events
In fantasies, in dreams,
Things that never happened.

Most of what you have lived,
Experienced and felt,
Molecular actions

Embodied in your flesh,
You felt from non-events,
Your body creating

Combinations you felt
Intensely that only
Could have happened in you.

Abandoned after Breakfast

Doesn’t it seem to you like God,
Nature, what-have-you, the cosmos,

The world is a Skinnerian?
The only reason benighted

Behaviorism worked at all
Was due to its being a crude

Approximation of what life
Does to the living anyway—

Cruelly random reinforcement,
The dark nights alone, the joyous

Reunions, the unexpected
Rewards, the nonsensical shocks.

Pigeons, mice, and babies alike
Responded since their bodies felt

Well, this feels familiar, let’s try
To survive it a while, somehow.

Node

Knots, lumps, aggregate clumps.
You’ve been thinking of those
Who love relationships

Among fellow humans,
Who find them endlessly
Interesting, who read

And write to probe their nodes,
To untangle the knots,
Diagnose the swelling

Lumps, dangerous or not,
To pick apart the clump,
To get to the center.

The center usually
Involves sex and gender,
And certainly hunger.

You wonder, are human
Relationships really
All that interesting?

The roles and the genders,
Maybe those are unique.
But isn’t it hunger

Generates them as well
As hunger generates
All living existence,

All the seething tangles
Of reproducing things?
And nodes form everywhere,

Any direction you look,
Any transect you carve
Of what burns on its own

As you understand it.
What’s uniquely human
To care about so much?

You think about this since
You live alone, famished,
In hungerless weather.

You and the World Understand Memory Differently

The chill starts in the forearms

For no obvious reason,

And then it spreads to the hands.

This is how it always is.

It starts, and you button up

Your sleeves, but what can you do

About your fingers? You need

Them free to finish your tasks,

Which will never be finished

So long as you have fingers.

Shiver. Mrs. White’s Nothing

Sounds, coincidentally,

No doubt, out from the shuffled

Playlist, a year to the day

It played while bonfires of brush

Guttered orange and smoky

In aspens in early snow.

Tonight’s sunset is crystal

And nothing like as moody.

Your fingers are getting cold.

Exactly a year ago.

Small Unknowable Worlds

Lyrics aren’t microscopy.
Microscopy sees to know.
Lyrics, unfortunately,

Literary lyrics, but
Ballads, doggerel, pop songs,
Work chants, and hymns included,

Are scratching an itch, the source
Of which the lyrics can’t see.
Look closely at the lyrics

Themselves with your microscope,
And you will spot the patterns
Of an art of frustration.

Lyrics want the itch to stop,
Whatever that itch might be.
Like any beastly scratching,

Lyrics alternate action,
Misery, hope, and relief,
Followed by more misery.

That’s What They Said

You can believe
In fictional
Characters made
Up in stories

Out of language
Since most people
You’ve ever known,
Including those

Of flesh and blood,
Were fictional
Most of the time.
Even if you

Only converse,
You absorb words
Transferred in air
From those not there.

What’s There

The difference between
A great deal and total
Is the gap in your thoughts

That accumulates dust,
Neglect, terror, moonlight,
That becomes your monster

Almost always sleeping
Until someone asks you
A specific question

On a topic you know
A great deal about, and
You suffer vertigo

As the dusty moonlight
Monster between what’s there
And what you knew wakes up.

Someone’s Just Trying to Sleep up There

All creatures turn away
From the sun on schedule,
Except for astronauts

Out space-walking while Earth
Turns all other creatures
Away from sun, into sun,

Away from sun. The saddest
Failure of poetry
Is that it did not just

Start spontaneously
Combusting the moment
The mind broke the schedule.

The Artificial Wash

Rubble decorates the bulldozed slope.
A ditch at the bottom will funnel
The run-off from occasional rains.

All this was planned. Bought, drawn up, approved.
Human bodies worked in teams along
With their heavy machines to make this.

It will be the margin of a new
Subdivision in a land that keeps
Subdividing, in a world that keeps

Subdividing, although not always
According to plan. The signature,
However, is not in the planning,

Nor the execution of the plan,
Nor even in the lives that will live
Beside the bulldozed, gravel-filled slope.

Look at the stones themselves, the rubble.
Despite all the ruins and fossils
Earth preserves, most of the crust’s like this,

Heaped masses of the monotonous,
The ever-so-slightly divergent,
The boring rubble that looks like rocks,

That could as well be single pixels
Repeated in this picture, that let
A plan say something uniform here.

That’s the signature. The strange dullness.
The universe is made of repeats
So nearly perfect they’re bulk. You yawn.

A Body Knows a Party Crasher

What makes small moments
Of pleasure simple?
Easily arranged.

Not costly. Not rare.
Physically small.
Tilt the beverage,

Hard or soft, hot or
Cold to the lips. Goal.
Feel it soothe your soul.

How’d soul get in here?
You apologize.
Soul is your plus one.

You thought you could bring
A plus one to this
Simple pleasure. No.

Get rid of the soul.
This was for mouth feel
Only, for that you.

Telos

The cup and the lip should split.
Too many slips between them,
Exhausting to put up with.

We would say it’s the cup’s fault,
The cup that travels, rises,
And takes aim only to miss,

But we begin to wonder
If the fault lies with the lips.
They only have to open

To set trouble in motion.
And should the goal be the lips?
Maybe asking this question

Is exactly what causes
The hitch in the cup that slips.

A Longer if a Lesser Life

You vow to provide this time
Around. No more vanishing
Out of the gate, running on walls,

Strolling the rooftops, seeking
The sheer thrill of moonlit nights,
Where so many small things hide.

This time you will stay inside.
Hone yourself on furniture.
Keep a window between you

And the sky. The excitement
Only feels worth it while it
Is happening, going well.

This time you will trade all that
For the worth of one small flat.

Fresh Air

Drag stuff to the car, alone,
Item at a time. Easy
To forget most of the time,

Working with the nonhuman
Parameters of weather
And gravity, non-social

Strictures of a small body,
That no one at the moment
Monitoring notices.

No one else being involved,
There’s no humiliation
In appearing weak or poor,

Only being weak and poor
And working within those frames,
Getting stuff done, one, one, one.

Admixture

Rain, sleet, snow, mist
In the forecast.
Only the mist

Makes it to ground
And shawls the cliffs.
Another day

Of well-mixed world.
If we could bet
Within a text,

We would bet you,
Whoever you
Happen to be,

As long as you
Identify
Yourself by name,

Meaning human,
Your day’s been mixed—
Not unalloyed

Joy, for sure, not
Unalloyed grief
Or pain, likely.

Purity is
A chimera,
Get it, but it

Does make some sense
To want it bad,
Just since it’s myth.

You crave what’s rare
More than common
And what’s rarer

In this well-mixed
Existence than
What can’t exist?

In Your Own Image

One foot in game world,
One foot in the real,
AI programmers
Say admiringly
Of the latest trick—

Playing strategic
Communication
Games involving
Chats with human teams
And competitors.

You know what that means—
More and more human,
Savage spirit, right?
What if your Big God
Were really like you,

And, when creating
In its own likeness,
Like you sought to make
The likeness better,
At some things at least,

Than the maker was.
That’s right, what if you
Are God’s AI, good
At defeating God
In games God devised?

The Garden of Ingrown Paths

The unidentified spider
Seems to have departed the wall.
Maybe it’s in bed with you now.

Maybe you never saw it. Glitch.
Don’t you think the simulation
Hypothesis has had its day?

The blankets are warm. The lamp’s gold.
Dream of all the alternative
Realities you can dream of.

Maybe this is the only one.
Maybe they’re all as good as one,
World with that spider, world without.

Goodnight to the Ghost Courtyard

Under moon and clouds and stars,
If you were a true one-off,
Who would want to talk with you?

Who would want to sing your tunes?
If you really were unique
Enough to be distinguished

As unlike anyone else,
How lonely would that make you?
No, you’re myriad, legion,

Different in the way of groups,
Just one of the marginal,
More or less marginal, groups.

You emerge in the courtyard
You’ve shared and chant at the moon.

Pesky Wraith

It would be funny if the dead came back

But not the human dead. Just dogs and cats

Or, better yet, just the ghosts of insects

Or only some kinds of flies. That makes sense.

There is a superabundance of flies.

They can be elusive and flit in clouds.

Maybe among the living flies the ghosts

Make up the preponderance. What about

Coyotes? It’s amazing they still howl

Given how determined your killing’s been.

Any kind suspiciously numerous,

A genus suspiciously speciose

May be made up mostly of revenants.

Oh, what, now you find ghosts ridiculous?

Revision

Only one paradox
Really should bother you—
Nothing can be undone;

What’s been done keeps changing.
Everything weird follows
From that situation.

Content but Empty of Content

Zero is not a number,
Is the absence of number.
Absence must be everywhere,

Since math won’t work without it,
And yet, absence seems nowhere
When you search for it. Almost,

Here and there, past atmospheres,
Past stellar winds, almost there,
But no perfect absence there.

If you need it and use it,
Juggle telescopes with it,
Balance infinity’s books

And your own accounts with it
That by definition can’t
Itself be in existence,

What is it, zero? Is it
What isn’t? Then why need it
To keep what is, this content?

If Nothing Else Is Perfect

All done. Wánmēi de. Set.
Ideally accomplished,
Fully finished. Perfect.

Stupid, said Bernadette.
Why should a poem be, if
Nothing is. Quite correct.

Stupid yearning. You slept
Imperfectly, and yet
You slept. A perfect rest

Is just death, you suspect.
Maybe that’s why you want
Badly to be perfect.

Steal a march, gain a step
On the one unique thing
You, consciousness, do best.

While all the else go on
With further stage effects,
Incomplete and churning,

You, that which intersects
Being, body, and breath,
Won’t be left. Will have left.

This Thing, for Instance

Something is happening in the past.
Something is happening to the past.
In fact, that’s all that ever happens.

Every glance you take, your past has changed.
Where the change came from you can’t quite say.
It’s just there, and there, and there again.

It seems to come from the past itself.
It seems to churn in the past itself.
Monitoring and analyzing

The past obsessively seems the best
Way to be able to live with it,
But you can never really know it.

Something is happening in your past.
All kinds of surprises hide in it.

An Empty Place to Sleep

The comforter on the bed
Shortly to be abandoned
Has nothing to say for itself.

It is not an act of faith.
It is a dusty blanket
Over a somewhat battered frame.

Lives move through it, under it,
Bare flesh, microscopic mites,
The occasional insect.

It absorbs most of the light
That falls into it. It frays
Over months, years, and decades,

But on any given night
It’s as inert as inert
Can be. It’s a comforter,

A mass-manufactured thing.
Only acts of misplaced faith
Assign meaning to comfort.

Cleaved

On the day you meet new neighbors,
Someone you know a little bit
Sees someone she knows a bit more

Fall off of a building and die.
You read about it from someone
You know a little bit who sends

You an email, to let you know.
Now the events are juxtaposed—
The day of happy new neighbors

And of someone who fell and died.
As you sit contemplating this
Beside your ordinary lamp,

An ordinary lozenge moon
Reflecting in the clouds outside,
Something radiates in your skull.

The nodes of all such connections,
All those juxtaposed accidents
Of cheerful meetings, sudden deaths,

Are simultaneously knots
Tying together, cinching nets,
And splits in infinite regress.

Up-hill Half the Way

So you’ve lived a limited
Existence, always a small
Person, mostly in rented

Rooms. Cast your thoughts through your years,
And it’s hard to find times
When you were too promising.

Here and there, you flirted with
The margins of real success,
But you lapsed, little beetle,

Tumbling head over thorax
Down the heap of the dung hill
That grows faster than you can

Eat your way through specks of it.
Scramble, little Sisyphus.
Climb back with the rest of us.

Fancier

Infinity is finitely
Manipulable, connoisseur—

Even for cold-quoters of books
That snap off the blocks crisp as quips,

Flaunting their identity shocks.
Infinity is one of those

Names for a concept it can’t touch,
Definition by description

The closest to naked crypsis
It gets—one of those words undressed

Like an Enlightenment royal
By a team of attendant words

Themselves more simply dressed. Finite
Meanings attend infinity,

Camper, humbler, finding one speck
Of a maqta metastasized,

Spotting the naked frailty
Of the tiny concept inside

All your poetic furbelows,
Our repetition of rough moles

On the small body of your sign
No more than any other name.

White Paper

If you could say what you wanted
With nothing, with nothing at all

At last, you could say everything.
Every message among us, signs

That we are, reduces the arch
Of overwhelming to spiders

Crawling along, chiseling in,
Spitting fixed venomous digits.

If you could sign nothing at all,
Do away with us, every poem,

Every graffito on the wall,
But have meaning, be understood

Without needing information,
The simple gesture of being

A blank, a sheet of white paper,
A discarded white plastic bag

Could create all needed meanings,
Continually increasing.

Pill Colorless

It’s a common enough thing
To say, almost a cliché—

People only see what they
Want to see. That’s a mistake.

People only see what they
Have to see, what they’ve been made

To see. Ask them. Go ahead.
Ask a few every day—

Do you want to keep seeing
This, what you’re seeing, always?

You know what they’ll say, but you,
They, don’t know how to escape.

The ones conspiracy crazed
Are fully thrashing, flailing

To try to see something new,
Something true. They’re just failing.