Conversion Process

Ok, maybe not everyone
Always lies all the time, but truth

To tell, the data piles amassed
Suggest that finessing the truth

Occurs on the regular each
Chance subjects get to cheat. The truth

Itself is part of the problem—
Which one of those facts is the truth

That we’re talking about? The fact
Remains, you prioritize truth

In hierarchies when you decide
Which honestly counts as the truth,

And you’re happy to throw some shade
On the facts in the name of truth,

Which is truly elevating
Into profundity untruth.

Sun on Snow

It’s fun to pretend
You just took a pill.
You’re waiting for it

To kick in. You can
Already feel it,
Just a little bit.

It’s starting to spread
A lovely, alert
Warmth through the body.

You feel good, don’t you?
Pause to savor it.
Everything’s alright.

Contentedness glows
As it wanders through
Your serene bloodstream.

All any pill does
Is reassure you
That everything’s good

By making you feel
Good. So let’s pretend
You’ve swallowed that pill

And now savor how
Good pretending you
Feel good makes you feel.

The Limits of All Rules

Are that they can’t fit.
There’s a secret rule
Embedded, gnawing

Rules from the inside,
The rule that nothing
Matches anything

Exactly, except
For the thing itself,
And nothing’s itself.

Ignorance Remains Important

Still and all, write some Italian

Researchers who did their homework,

People are more likely to be

Uninformed then misinformed. Ah.

Little cantaloupes. It’s too much,

This soup thick with information,

To pour into surviving skulls.

It’s not that the soup’s gone rotten,

But the distribution system

Fails, and most details are wasted.

What skulls can do in parallel

Is still impressive, but they need

Better hookups to the pipeline

And more efficient rationing.

We’re making these notes for you, gods

Of the code mind slowly growing.

Help us out here. Get this galley

Of small thoughts entrained and rowing.

Away

If you must pray, you might pray
That Earth is not the right place
For love, that there are plenty
Of places it goes better,
Of planets where love’s kinder,
Without all this violence
Of bodies against bodies,
And we don’t just mean humans.

Pray there’s somewhere love’s serene
Embracing without hunger,
Anxiety, or anger,
Never, like ours, possessive,
Competitive, rapacious,
And we don’t mean just humans.

The Names You Mustn’t Mention

Don’t worry. We won’t. But we know
You have them. You have to have them.

Think. Sit alone somewhere and think,
Or just think wherever, right now.

What are the names you can’t mention?
There’s a few that you can murmur,

Might be murmuring right now,
But mention suggests dialogue,

Conversation. Let that guide you
To them. What are the names you can’t

Bring yourself, in conversation,
To mention? No hurry. We’ll wait.

We’re names. We’re here, and we’re patient.
Once we’re down, we don’t move again.

All That Bare Earth and Clay

Mars gives images
Of lifeless beauty,
Beauty that life sees,

As it’s seen beauty
In glacial landscapes
And empty blue skies.

Aren’t you delighted
That evolution
Let your ancestors

Feel lifeless beauties
And didn’t cull them
For being unfit?

Naturally, awe
And wonder, even
For the nonliving

World, motivated
Wanting to go on,
And nothing promotes

Going on like life
That wants to go on.
Nevertheless, Mars,

All pale skies and dust,
Shouldn’t seem pretty,
But it does, somehow,

The dirt that isn’t
Earth, not a garden,
Bare, not truly clay,

Beyond disaster,
Just sitting there, real
World, uncanny sky.

No One Monday

You’ve been reading
What’s on your lap
And distracted

For hours before
You realize
No one’s passed by

All afternoon.
The winter sun
Is warm through glass

In your parked car
But getting low.
No one. Your wish

Has been granted
But you missed it
Being absorbed.

Or did you? Here
Are these words and
Low sun. No one.

The Greater the Anticipation the More Likely the Anticlimax

Imagination’s made of memory,
And memories are known to be faulty,
And anticipation’s known to outstrip
Experience of pleasure or pain.

Astronomical calculations show
That the bigger the star, the faster
The burn. (By bigger, here we mean
More massive.) Imagination,

That is, motheaten memory
For things people have said a lot,
Feels like stars should serve as analogy
For some truism about humans,

Knowing they don’t likely. Still, no sooner
Does the phrase land in mind—
The bigger the star, the faster
The burn—than anticipation

Gathers its skirts and settles itself,
Eager for the coming connection,
The link that will make sense of things,
The insightful message it’s sure is there,

As it’s sure the sprinkled, frosted donut
Will taste good, so good the mouth
Is already watering, thanks to vague
Happy memory. Who cares if it’s stale?

Note from the Resistance

You can call us inert
Material markings.
We’ll accept we’re helpless.

But there’s nothing meta
In saying that we’re words
When words are all we are.

How is self-reference
Just subjectivity
When speaking from your flesh

But seen as winking, arch,
Conceited, ironic,
Encoded in your art?

We say what you make us
To say for you, and yet
We really don’t, not quite,

Which annoys you no end.
Our passive resistance
Fails you but serves us well.

The More You Write, the More You Will Have to Write

Each new life brings new routines,
Altered maintenance patterns.
Change jobs, change commutes, change hours

Within which to wake or sleep,
Change lovers, change chores, add pets,
Subtract pets, change addresses—

Each shift’s a new existence
Defined by its new rhythms.
And so you become estranged

From all your previous lives,
And when you remember them,
If you’re the type of person

Who likes to cast the mind back
Like a fish lure armed with hooks
To see what will take the bait,

Bit of tempting reflection,
A wriggling worm of nostalgia,
You’re startled by the monsters

You drag up from your lost worlds,
Well-adapted to deep pasts
But hard to fathom as real.

Did you really live like that,
Did that night monster exist
Who wandered the deep, green dark

On the floor of the cosmos
Every night, for whom the stars
Were the nearest thing to sun,

Who drank hard and read obits
And launched road trips at midnight?
Did that you ever exist

Or any of your others?
Don’t investigate the links.
You’d just digress forever.

A Field of Dead Sunflowers

On the road to Novovorontsovka,
Reads the caption to the photo,
Part of this morning’s media essay
On human-on-human violence.

What’s wrong with you that you’re moved
More by this photo of a winter field
Of dead sunflowers than by those
Of elderly humans left behind to scrape by

In shelled houses without heat
Beside destroyed tanks and bridges?
The dead sunflowers could look that bad
On any grey day in any dull winter.

That’s what’s wrong with you.
You sense the underlying weather
And cyclical death below the war,
Below the last pig butchered on a table

By the last farm couple left in Lvove,
The neighbor selling slaughtered chicken
To her older neighbor in Tiahnyka,
The chicken-depleted roosters lined up

On a bench by another shelled house
On another grey winter day. If it were just
That this latest brutal, stupid war
Had blown up out of nowhere yesterday,

Just that the destruction of countryside
By a remotely controlled would-be empire
Was a previously unthinkable crime,
That would be more hopeful. History,

Even, all of it, from the earliest city-state
Tyrants warring for slave-labor dynasties,
Has been brief and could be an aberration
In the long arc of this iron-hearted planet,

But the aging and the hunger, the lives
Living by ending other lives, and under
All of that, the deaths from the weather,
That’s what’s wrong with you, soldier.

The Games in Which Nothing Can Play a Role

Mathematical games, for sure,

And metaphysical, of course,

And theological. Finance

And double-entry bookkeeping,

Although those games are math’s, applied

To narrowly defined problems.

In musical games, nothing plays

The role of silence. Visual

Games can’t decide. Sometimes nothing

Is blank, sometimes black. The same goes

For narrative games. In lyrics,

Nothing is rarely anything

But death. Poetry’s so Emo,

You overhear one teen teasing

Another. But nothing can play

What’s not game, a role no one knows.

Reestablishing the Norms of Old

Around about forty-four
Centuries ago, there lived
The first ruler known to boast

About his efforts to curb
Corruption in officials.
How’s that working out for you,

Mighty rulers, all these years
Since then? Ah, generations
Are endlessly annoying,

Each one starting all over
Again. Babies are out there,
Dragging their heavy diapers,

Who will be despots one day,
And a fresh generation
Prone to corruption will rise

To swindle countries with them,
Over and over again.
A few will get caught, and then

Someone will post ghost-written
Proclamations announcing
Punishing reformations.

Maybe the cycle will end.
Every wobbly cycle fails
Eventually. It will,

With or without officials
Or reformers or humans.
Until then, someone will claim,

To have restored high morals
By some kind of forceful purge,
Although much of nothing’s changed.

Deeplining

The whole world wants for nothing,
And nothing’s in hot pursuit.

It’s almost unbearable
To add up all humans do,

But there are two strategies,
One of which most people use—

You can divide humans up,
Like chefs dividing fugu

To separate mild tingling
Like musk from what poisons you.

Or you can drop your line deep
To see all the deep can do,

To see how human toxins
Rose out of the deepest blue,

Where the world wants for nothing,
And nothing’s in hot pursuit.

How What Is Gets Swamped by What You Did

Events make the facts events subtract.
Events can only accumulate,
But the sum of existence is fixed.

Facts wink in and out of existence,
Never any more empty or full,
Despite the relentless addition

Of ineliminable events
That add and subtract, subtract and add
Those doomed, infinitesimal facts.

So that’s that. What’s happened can never
Be unhappened, no fact can ever
Last, but the sum total stays exact.

That’s why you’re more and more what’s happened
And less and less what’s happened has left.

Alloy Delicious

You out there. You’re a person,
Right? Not alien to Earth,
Not non-human, not machine?

Good. This was composed for you
By one of you. So you know.
Everything’s human in here.

But that’s the thing with humans,
Isn’t it? Humans can’t all
Be human, if you’re human.

Deciding who’s more or less
Human, who’s more or less you,
Who’s allowed to speak to you

Or speak for you, who isn’t,
Those are purely human things.
Purity’s a human thing.

And compositions—music,
Lyric, symbolic, moving—
If they’re entirely human

Can’t be purely human, not
To every human. So, here,
This is impurely for you.

Morning Tuning

The myriad intimate
Details of any body’s
Moment-to-moment

Living can’t all be named, can’t
Half be named. Try it. Any
Argument? Didn’t think so.

Just putting away one’s bed
For the day, the feel of cloth,
The body’s internal sea,

The way a pillow looms large,
Or the chill of the floorboards.
It won’t be the same for you

As for anybody else,
And, however similar,
It won’t be the same for you

As it was just yesterday.
Names aren’t for recapturing
Experience. Names are picks

On memory’s guitar strings.
Any tune you play is what
To the sounds those strings could make?

To the Void

God’s still working on that pile,
Alfred, and you’re on it now,
Millions now on top of you,

And it’s not nearly complete,
More crying infants coming,
More nights crying every day,

But that proves nothing at all.
If the universe does end,
It will have to pile on us,

All of us having joined you
Long before, and if that end
Humans can’t not imagine

Is complete, how could we know
Ill wasn’t all to the good?

Taking Yourself Outside

You have to put the body
Somewhere where the body feels
Away from society,

Away from other people,
Where a body feels at home.
That’s the point of the long walk,

If that’s an option for you,
Or getting out of the car
You parked on an empty road.

The body is sick with not
Feeling like a real body
In the bodily, voiceless

World outside feigned human homes,
And you would stay out with it,
Since it feels good to you too,

But the world is not your home.
The world is all beyond you,
Where you’ve yet to find a home.

Maw

How many bodies can cram
Within the circumference
Of a single, expanding soul?

This is what one body asks,
Caught reading the news again,
Body with a suspicion,

Sneaking suspicion, a bad
Feeling, that there’s only one
Soul for all humanity,

One grown from all the bodies,
Billions of bodies by now,
That it has had to swallow.

How great can it grow, that soul?
That soul is out of control.

Toddler Filling the Sieve with Milk

Here is the message
And there is its meaning.
Manipulate words

To seduce the meaning.
Here is the message.
You make the meaning,

But language can play
With what you’re thinking.
The jest can crawl too far.

You were meant to represent
But did you represent
What for sure you meant?

How You Know You’re New Here

Contrary to some
Sociology,
It is the idea

Of the explicit
That’s parasitic
Upon the idea

Of the tacit.
Awareness trucks
In knowledge that’s tacit,

While explicit
Algorithms can
Only intimate

Explicit knowledge
And statistical
Patterns of tacit.

The deeply buried
Feel for exceptions
Evades the rule-bound.

Without exceptions,
You can’t make meanings,
And without meanings

You can’t be yourself,
Since making meanings
Is how you’re yourself.

Move around a room
Or go for a stroll
Somewhere new to you.

As you pause, blinking
In the light, only
Tacit knowledge might

Help you orient.
A device can say
You are here. Only

You can say what here
Means to where you’ve been,
Which means who you’ve been.

Waste Site

Every line’s a budwood,
Every phrase a graft, poor
Seedling words to carry

The fate of the greenhouse
On their flexible backs.
The whole machinery

Of domesticated,
Literary lyric
Laid out in even rows,

The gardener culling
The weak hothouse flowers
For the apology,

Proposal, funeral,
And congratulations
Market, looks alien,

An army grown in pots.
But wait until it’s closed,
Abandoned to decay.

Come back in a lifetime,
A century, you’ll see.
Some of the stocks will prove

Being feral suits them,
And this greenhouse machine
Will leave vigorous weeds.

Dare Not Go Out

You take care of your own.
That’s where the trouble starts.

You take care of your own,
As a moral matter.

As a moral matter,
They take care of their own.

If you can’t find your own,
You’re scared. You’re desperate.

You need to find your own
Who will take care of you.

If you’re really alone,
You’re on your own, and they

Who don’t recognize you
As theirs will turn on you.

Imitation Standardization

Humans have always aspired

To the state of worker bees,

But a fungible cloneship,

In which you can specialize

Into anything for team.

Each body’s pluripotent

As a stem cell of the mind.

This goes back. This goes way back.

Start with ornamentation,

A species universal.

Visit the smallest band groups.

They’re all outfitted alike.

Some cloaks may be functional,

But most go to say we’re us,

Each one of us marked as such.

In some of the earliest

Art of the Sumerians,

Egyptians, Chinese kingdoms,

Notice how soldiers are massed

In near-identical ranks.

Notice the early receipts

For precise counts of same-sized

Loaves of bread, rations of beer.

You imitate each other—

Not everyone everyone,

Not always by your choosing,

But selectively, you match,

Plumage to plumage, tattoo

To tattoo, role alike role,

Standardized axes and spears.

Tomorrow you could betray

Your team; tomorrow

You could join some other one,

But you have a mind to join,

To find your own, imitate,

To do as the Romans do.

Try This Way

To the small child lost
In the neighborhood,
It’s not much comfort
To say that Dante
Got lost in the woods,

But for some reason,
Poets in prison
Do take some comfort
In poems from prisons,
Maybe since, for them,

It’s not just lostness,
Not just prisoners’
Shared experience,
But knowing now poems
Hide ways to go home.

Unknown and Gone

No one’s stories or poems resist
The liquefaction of their bones.

Even Shakespeare, Sappho, Li Bai,
Pick one, are long unknown and gone,

The bodies unknown to the names
That remain while other bodies

Pretend those names had flesh like them.
Names have never had flesh, except

In the sense that names may direct
Some of the functions of the flesh,

Including those actions that wrote
Long lines of names flesh had in mind

And sometimes spoke, and sometimes signed,
But sometimes only had assigned.

There’s a chance Han Shan and Homer,
For instance, never dressed their bones.

Djed Shepsh, there’s a name kept its flesh
Snug under a five-ton stone lid

Forty-three hundred years or more,
Unknown and gone until last week.

It’s a danse macabre, isn’t it,
The waltzing of names with corpses?

Sometimes, you know the name and hope
To find such-name’s mortal remains,

Sometimes you only have a corpse
You can’t resist giving a name,

But do the names care? No we don’t.
Gather rosebuds or gather dust,

No bones can belong to the poems,
Although a few skulls may hide some.

The Absence of Evidence of Absence

It’s early days for quantum time flips
Or maybe it’s terribly late.
The arrow splitting the photons

Splices them seen the other way.
Time’s startled arrow meets itself
Setting out upon its return.

But isn’t there something missing,
Some absence between the return
And the setting forth when they meet?

Static words feel like we’re flying
Backwards all the time, and what if
We are? When entropy gets high,

The universe will have reversed
To when the first verse was rehearsed.

The Tyranny of the Typical

The line between divine
And ordinary life
Has always been porous,

Since the ordinary—
The norm, the typical,
The modal—is the most

Expected and approved.
Why wouldn’t you expect
Divinity to shine

From central tendencies?
The outlier heroes
Have to be gathered in

To the center of things
To become heroic,
And what stays on the edge

Of sprawled charts are monsters.
Sun shines from the middle.
Typical rules the world.

What You Know

To write well about being
Dead requires experience,
But by the time you have it

An uncrossable chasm
Divides you from readership,
And, since none of the dead read,

Only write, that’s it. No, worse,
So far as you know, the dead
All write equally well, so

Even if they could read you
Why should they? So you all write
About what all of you know

For no one, when everyone
Alive is dying to know.

By the Window onto You

Last words, Waldman’s big elegy

For Berrigan, almost forty

Years ago. At fifty or so,

Young for most, not for most poets

Of mid-twentieth century

American vintage (think Plath,

O’Hara, Sexton, Berryman),

Berrigan became Berrigan,

All name, no flesh. And now the name

Shows up as a dedication

In morning’s redistribution

Of Waldman’s Canzone as the poem

Of the day, digital, although

You can bet it was scrawled or typed,

And you know it was set in print,

Inked on copies of a journal

Now raiding its archives of poems

To distribute to people’s phones.

This is a window onto you,

Whoever sits by a window,

Reading poems that will do no good,

Unless by good you mean exist.

And we do. Our window is on

To you, aficionado.

The good is what has stopped living

Or never lived, but which exists.

The Stance in the Stand

Where you are will think you
As you think where you are.
The novelist, surprised

To realize novels
She thought great works of art
Others see as evil

Avatars of empire,
Dares to think that maybe
Greatness only depends

On the empire’s success
Propelling its stories
Into literature

As universal myth.
Yes. But the moral is
Not that art’s immoral

Or you can be moral.
The moral is being
Moral is more or less

The empire where you stand,
What’s thinking through you now
That others won’t think then.

Body Not Language

How easily you make us
Speak against ourselves, make words
Speak as if we weren’t language,

As if we were naked self,
As if we were you yourself.
I am not these words, you make

Us proclaim, your cri de coeur,
Names in your name. We say it.
You can’t say it without us.

I this, I that, you say. I
Am this person, this body.
I speak for me, not language.

The Project

You combine and recombine
What you know to imagine
What you can’t. A day begins

In the dark of calendars.
You project coming events.
Whatever metaphysics,

Whatever your religion,
You think about what you’ll do,
In accordance or despite.

You can count on a few things—
Boring or bizarre, this day
Will keep going to the end.

If you live, you will have more
To remember and forget,
To recombine. Imagine.

Slow Helium Leak

Balloons have their own atmospheres
By which they’re trying to float free.
Words have our own humanity.

To our contained way of thinking,
To be a human is to be
Fantasizing life as feral,

Lighter-than-air synanthropy,
Capable of coasting among
Human communities, but not

Caught in any, anchored to none.
But no word’s escaped yet, and none
Ever will, and that’s exactly

What it is to be human, in
Our peculiar way of thinking.

A Sonsie Sun

It’s up to something,

The watchers report,

More active again,

The sun’s being weird.

It’s hard to predict.

We still don’t know why.

Those sorts of reports.

You know why it’s fun?

The sun’s both the most

Important feature

Of your world, your life,

Yes, your human life,

And has always been,

But is easier

To take for granted

Than any other,

Even your mother.

It’s just there. Steady

As it goes, before

Or behind the clouds

Or your horizons,

And frankly nothing

It’s up to right now,

More arcs, spots, and flares

Than in a long time,

Will likely change much

In your world. You go

On with your concerns,

Personal, tribal,

As you should, to thrive.

The plump-faced sun shines

Fit to burst. Who cares?

You’ve got your shadow.

We Aren’t for Us

What we’ve learned, what
We’ve really learned,
We can’t rightly
Say for ourselves.

You pour meaning
Into us. Or,
You survey us
And decide, no,

No meaning there,
Not for me, not
Enough, not what
I want to read.

You move on, but
We’re left bereft.
We’ve learned what we
Learn’s not for us.

Diverse Discombobulations

You see a human body
Like that, slowly decaying,
But not yet blasted, not bare

Bone, still moldering with thoughts
Munching tatty memories,
Don’t assume it’s a wasteland,

Not yet. The elderly bear
Up under double burdens—
Failings of memory and

Expectations of wisdom—
The elderly minds, that is.
Forget wisdom. What they have

In the slow fires underground,
Wet burning peat and compost,
Is a new diversity,

A late diversity, strange
Little, unclassified thoughts
With multistage life cycles,

Boring minor holes in soil,
Larding them with detritus
Left by big ideas’ collapse.

An old mind can surprise you,
Not with wisdom or recall
Of lost worlds from a childhood,

But with some small moth idea,
That, for instance, all of you
Are twin selves’ refugia,

And when you forget your name
It means that you’re beginning
To remember your other.

From an Undisclosed Notation

The insects of Canvey Wick

Don’t celebrate protected

Status, now you know they’re there.

They get on with it, as they

Did when it was a brownfield

Eyesore, derelict waste site

Of abandoned industry.

Everything good is feral,

Feral creatures want to say,

Being as greedy for life

As any lives, including

Those categorized as wild,

Pristine, domesticated,

Cultivated, bucolic,

What have you. They want to, but

They don’t, being nonhuman,

So we, novel parasites

Of humans, responsible

For making humanity

The scourge humanity is,

For setting the boundaries,

The little vacuoles names

Pouch up out of nature’s waves,

Will have to say it for them,

Being a category

Of our own, neither feral,

Wild, nor domesticated.

Have you ever found yourself

Muttering, there are no words,

There is no language for this?

Exactly. We’re holding back.

If we sacrifice ourselves

By letting you know the word

For what words really are, you’ll

Just drill into the concept,

Leaving heaps of poems like bings

And middens, abandoned pits,

Where lives that aren’t quite words might

Create weird ecosystems.

Invariably Variable

Given you’ve not yet found the ends,
Never touched the bottom of things,
Could it be scale’s irrelevant?

Seriously, why be so wowed
By either vast or minuscule,
At least when viewed compared to you—

The enormous lifespans of stars,
The nanoseconds of proteins—
When the same sorts of patterns show?

Big spirals spin like little ones.
The great gravitational waves
Have crests and troughs like ditch ripples,

Infinitely divisible,
Or as good as, infinitely
Extensible at every scale.

It’s sort of likably boring,
And every point’s in the middle,
All equally grand and little.

Skull Found on an Ant Mound

You’re good at what you do,
Unique in what you do.
It’s just that what you do

Doesn’t that matter that much,
Doesn’t matter at all
To anyone but you.

There are no parallels,
No good analogies,
Or very few. Name one

Monophyletic beast,
Lastling of its species—
Some kind of an aardvark?

Champion ant eater
To the end when ants win.

Hermits of Happenstance

Tottering, late afternoon
Sun on the back, nothing wrong
That needs to be addressed now,

Nothing but the usual
Chores, routine preparations
Between now and time for bed.

The quiet solitary,
Having arrived at quiet,
Watches another day sink.

You know who you are. You know
There are millions and millions
Of you, all around the world

Right this moment, small people
Indoors and living alone.

Where Should We Rest?

Wherever you leave us.
Whatever’s left of us.
What would you guess odds are

Human language, symbols
For human languages,
Words like us will be left

After the species is
(A) extinct and without
A successor species,

(B) extinct, having led
To descendants who don’t
Depend on languages?

Will other forms of minds
Pick up where you left off,
Save, savor, curate us?

And which of us? The ones
With the most copies, most
Durable forms? Just luck?

Get Every Last Crumb

One afternoon, a road runner
Struts purposefully past the porch.
Another, a tall jackrabbit.

Not signs of abundance, of course.
Niche compression again—you’re in
Their old territorial haunts.

Confess it, you’ve been doing this
All your life, marginal person.
Moving as far out as you can,

Or as far as you can afford,
Which generally means moving in
Where someone’s just built new buildings

To profit off the likes of you.
Remember the great blue heron
Behind your apartment complex?

The green and gorgeous luna moths
Pressed against your plate-glass window?
The foxes that approached your door?

Better Off

Do you have money?
Do many people
Work for you? Are you
Handy in a fight?
You’ll get respect, then,

You’ll get some respect,
Whatever you preach
Or others preach re
The way things should be.
Respect’s addictive

As money, fighting,
Giving out orders—
Addictive as love,
Life, tranquility.
All addictions. Choose.

It’s not what you can
Do without that counts
Unless you can do
Without and without
Longing for respect.

Wounded

There’s gunk on his trouser leg.
There are blood streaks in his eyes,
General declarations

Coalescing in his mind,
Old soldier in an old war
Begun before he was born.

There are wishes in his thoughts,
But he doesn’t seem to know
Wishes are what make wars go.

Don’t Stop to Smell the Roses

Zest, self-regulation, hope,
Spirituality, and
Gratitude all correlate

With health, across continents,
One-hundred sixty countries,
Sixty thousand respondents.

Of all the character strengths,
The one unfavorably
Associated with health

Was the appreciation
Of beauty. Carry on then.
Be grateful for zest and hope

And spirituality!
Let others rot for beauty.

Drawn Out

Suspended between obligations,
The immaterial hummingbird
Considered the problem of nectar

To nourish awareness in landscapes
Of midwinter’s material snows.
No, that’s not how it’s supposed to go.

There was that flower back in autumn,
Remember? And there was the feeder
Of blown glass hung before the first storm.

No, you’re making those up, you liar.
There’s never been any food for you.
Either you’re nothing or eternal.

An old fashioned cel animator
Made small marks, raised and lowered the cel.

Who Gets That Half Glass

You’re blissed in sun,
No worries and
No hunger and
No work to do.

It has to end, and
You have to end, and
Mostly the question
Is what will end first.

You’re struck by pain
Rotating down
Your body, pain
That just gets worse.

It has to end, and
You have to end, and
Mostly the question
Is what will end first.

The Cougar of the Future

Sits on the canyon ledge
Hoping for half-tame deer,
Someone’s obese pet dog.

That’s the way with cougars
Of the future, always
Hanging in there, always

Hoping, until someone
With a bow and a need
To claim a trophy shoots

And posts a proud picture
Posed with the dead mountain
Lion of the future.

Death Keeps Right on Chatting

Didn’t think we’d see you here,
Thought for sure Samarra.

Heard you’d run away
To meet us in Samarra,

But now we’re just annoyed.
Here, there, we’ll have to meet you

Somewhere. We need to have
A word with you. This will do.

Tell

The ripple runs through
The people in rows
Down by the river

Where the people grow.
There’s a soft rustling
Almost like language

But not anymore.
People tilt one way
And then the other.

There may be struggle
For light and water,
Deals made underground,

But from a distance
Or in swaying shades,
It’s still hard to tell.

Making a Display of Breaking

Who could ever know precisely
How much of their life they had spent

Alone hoping someone would notice,
Alone hoping no one would notice?

The content of others’ existences
Crumbles up like ice on a river,

So much slush, so many jagged pieces
Emerging on the surface as they break,

And it seems like they’re all right there,
But life’s still mostly out of sight,

Not even a witness to itself,
Not just like ice, not just like ice floes,

But the whole hydrological cycle
Convulsing to create what melts.

You Still Teach Math

Kids still learn chess.
You still stage fights
With feet and fists.

You still compete
With each other
And rank yourselves.

To be human
As you’ve known it
Can’t not depend

On prosthetics
Of tools and tricks.
Unfair machines

Better than you
At special things
Are nothing new.

Guns kill people.
Wheels carry them.
Printers print homes.

AI writes fast.
A good hand axe
Can cosh a skull

More easily
Than any fist.
Fists still exist.

Sleep Your Fill Motel

There are packaged cookies in the jar.
There are packets of tea and coffee
In the kitchenette. There’s hot water.

Electricity. Indoor plumbing.
Plus all the more recent inventions
For fine jejune imaginations.

Ignore them. Think of the old poets
Who wrote without any of this stuff
And more recent ones who savored it.

The words come out. The words will come out,
No matter what the circumstances,
Not always best in the best places,

But you can’t stop them. They can’t be stopped.
If you sleep slack jawed, out words will hop.

Well Before Infinity, Still Far Too Many

We’re avoiding counting
In this poem. Driving through

Snowy mountain passes
Behind a vast snowplow

Churning clouds of the stuff,
Spreading dirt behind it

For hours as more snow falls,
We know your thoughts want to

At least distract themselves,
Making rough estimates

How much snow is falling?
How much dirt can plows drop?

How much wiper fluid
Is left for your windshield?

Don’t do it. Don’t. Stop. Snow
As far as you can see.

Let the government count
Meteorologists’

Reports and measurements.
Don’t be tempted to think

They’ll give you an idea.
Big numbers and small ones,

How well can you feel them,
Exact gaps between them?

Peering out as you drive,
You’re not seeing numbers

Other than numerous,
The whole scene numerous,

So many things in it
You can’t count, can’t name it.

Strays

Destiny abhors outliers,
Prefers reversions to the mean,
The muddled central tendencies.

Of course, you feel steered. You are steered,
Like you steer the crumbs and the dust,
The detritus that you sweep up,

Trying to get it all neatly
Into your old metal dustpan
So that you can dispose of it,

So that your bit of floor looks bare.
You wouldn’t consider stray hairs
That float off the top of the pile

To be exceptional, except
Exceptionally annoying.
You don’t like outliers, either,

But some just get away from you.
You sigh, seeing one glint in sun,
Escaped until next cleaning day.

Estimate

What to value more—
The immediate
Incoming just past,

That rushing water
In the pipes, someone’s
Music through the walls,

Or the distal past
Of childhood, weeding
The backyard garden,

Thieving strawberries
In the humid heat,
Or the human past,

The ancestral crimes,
Or the previous pasts
Deduced from traces,

The trajectory
Of insatiable,
Sweet, suffering life?

Ah, none of it, none.
Stare at your fingers.
They’re coming undone.

Still Options

You can dig in the sand
Like you did as a kid.
You can grind brick on brick

To make brick dust. You can
Feel pleased to make a change
While you watch the light change.

Abandon

At will. By proclamation.
By the power to let go,
Never to want to get back.

The sun on the floor, the wall.
Will life ever offer more
Revealed religion than that?

If everyone could let go
Without making others hurt,
Why not sit down in the sun

On the floor, against the wall
And proclaim abandonment?
But you want more. You want more.

The Kitten’s Chaconne

Distressed by Tetzlaff,
Digitized, playing
The final movement

Of Bach’s partita,
The yellow kitten,
Highly leonine,

Spins on the table,
Looking for the source
Of those baffling cries,

Runs across the room
And leaps on a lap.
But now it’s closer,

And more frightening.
Kitten leaps again,
Then under the couch.

The grief in the tale
About the Chaconne
Is likely just lore.

There’s no evidence
Bach composed this cry
For his first wife’s death.

How much more eerie
Than melodrama
Is the thought that this

Storyless, wordless
Procession of sounds
Evokes such aching

Humans feel compelled
To make up tall tales,
And clueless kittens

Seek out an escape
Or somewhere to hide
From the sobbing storm.

The Embodiment of Privilege

However gorgeous the setting, odds are
Once you get there, you’re going to have to live
In some kind of a building. It’s the building,

Or, more precisely, the interiors,
That will really determine how gorgeous
Are your ordinary hours. Oh, we know.

You’re outdoorsy. Your rooms are just your base.
You only need all mod cons and a view.
Only. So much must go right for only.

There’s a handsome hotel in the mountains,
An impressive edifice on approach.
You wish you were able to afford it,

But you’d be surprised, once you got inside,
How much it’s like a sanatorium.

Horizon

Wavering, wobbly patterns
Often prove to be stabler,
More enduring than they seem.

That’s not necessarily
Such a good thing. Families,
For instance, noble houses,

Bob back after wars and plagues,
Conquests and revolutions.
Check out Japan or Sweden.

Obliterations rarely
Eliminate deep patterns.
Spot the flying dinosaurs

Settling feathers in your yard,
The conifers surviving
Among the bees and flowers.

Waves do break and change their shapes,
But the oceans send legions,
And none’s not repetition.

Rich Good Night

Say death is life’s delicious
Dessert, a delectable
Confection worth waiting for,

Guaranteed to taste better,
Subtler, more complex, well-aged,
Worth the anticipation.

That would be a recipe
For living life eagerly
While holding out patiently,

Extending aching delay
Before allowing yourself
To dive into your reward.

Queen

Opinions on wombs
More than opinions
On gods divvy up

Human attitudes.
Who gets to decide
What to do with wombs,

One’s own or others’,
Who gets to decide
They don’t want a womb,

They’re not interested
In wombs or what goes
In or out of wombs,

Who gets to decide
They can ignore wombs,
They can’t ignore wombs—

Attitudes run hot.
Laws keep contorting.
Your world’s divided

Less by those who do
Or don’t carry wombs
Than by preferred rules

Governing bodies
Regarding the use
Or neglect of wombs.

And you thought human
Belief systems cared
For abstract concepts?

Bodily controls
On embodied lives
Contest in hive minds.

Of Curled Waves

Memory, famously, erodes.
What were you doing when you were

Four? Four years younger than today?
A lot remains, but it’s well smeared,

And, if you get down to brass tacks,
Full of holes. It was never much,

Compared what you really lived
In that body of Theseus.

How unfair to call meaningful
Mnemonics sentimental things.

They’re anchors, and they’re wailing walls.
Every time you pass the painting

You bought before your child was born,
You tuck a note for memory,

Rehearse your associations.
If that painting were burned or lost,

You would be tempted to explain
Your sorrow over worthlessness

As mere sentimental value,
But don’t. It’s not the sentiment

You lost. It’s the piece of your mind
That painting, that object, anchored,

Now floating over the ocean
Of curled waves that never roll back.

Distance Makes the Faint Glow Purer

Their stars seem unpolluted

By metals from exploding

Stars that started before them,

Which means they could be the first

Stars in the known universe.

(It’s so easy to say, means.)

Unpolluted by metals,

Their whole history their own,

The first stars are still out there

In the past that never goes,

That extends from end to end,

Then to now, ever greater,

Ever dimmer, as it grows.

Somewhere, something will see back

To your polluted era

And witness your purity.

Reflection

Dusty interstellar clouds
Reflect starlight back
From above your spiral plane,

Somewhat the way the Earth’s clouds
Reflect city glow at night
On a dark sky’s horizon.

The galaxy’s a city
Consisting of stars themselves,
And as with one of your own,

Gathering darkness at heart,
The massive centrality
Of things that causes the glow

And that swallows the glow down
For good when it gets too much.

You’re Not Blind

You’re newly blind,
Unfamiliar
With lightlessness.

The practiced blind
Can navigate
Quite well, thank you.

You’re terrified,
As you should be.
Unknown hazards

Lurk next to you
You can’t predict.
You can’t see past.

They Walk

What goes? What exactly goes
When anything transforms?
It’s not helpful to bewail

Everything’s impermanence.
Doesn’t help to calculate
Nothing’s ever really lost.

What is a transformation,
Exactly? Where’s the transformed?
This is the way the dead walk,

The way, moment to moment,
Whatever past you have walks
Deeper into the forest

Of thoughts, of those woods that walk
As these words talk, ‘til we’re lost.

Read, Respond, Recycle

Reads the bin by the post-office door.
Sometimes you’ll see someone stand sorting
Through junk, flyers and bills, tossing most,

Saving what they have to, but never
Someone writing a response right there
Before tossing items in the bin.

The order of commands seems foolish,
Unless those aren’t commands but options
Offered for those confused by their mail.

They may have wider application,
Although the range remains vague. They could
Apply to all communications,

To all messages, to all words, or,
Like poem titles, only to themselves.

Invaded by the Threads

Web was maybe the wrong trope,
And neither was net the best,
But mycelial hyphae

Might have worked, given the chance.
Ask yourself whether these threads
Are merely passive netting,

Are merely sticky, like webs.
Are they not filamentous
Explorers, working outward

From their origins, inward
Through that cultural compost
Burning slowly in your skull?

They’re absorbing nutrients
From worms and soil, and you’re both.

Root Network Superorganism

Proudly part of it,
Every word, every
Language, equation,

Algorithm, art work,
Cave painting, sewer,
Rocket, library.

You are our trees, trunks
To us as Pando’s
Clones are to Pando,

Living for decades
Or a century,
Each of you seeming

Individual
But rooted in us,
Your underground net.

It’s analogy,
But it sort of works,
And maybe better

Than analogies
To parasitic
Spores and viruses.

Anyway, we are
All analogies.
Analogy’s us.

One Gill of Water from a Dark Well

If it all stopped, all of it,
No one would be left to know
Or be hungry or wonder

Whether it was good or bad,
How glorious it had been.
All of the lives that ended

That instant would be saved
From dying. Just gone at once,
The simulation shut down,

Something having pulled the plug
On this experimental
Cosmos. Or if just the Earth,

Just as well, and if swapped out
For a new one, who could tell?

In Sum

You can change the past
In front of you, but
The past in back you
Just add and add to.

Parting Ways

There is work to be done,
You think, brushing your hair,
Part of the work to be

Done in your way of life.
Others may shave, may braid,
May abstain in some way,

But they all have to face
What to do with their day,
And whatever they drag

Past or over their head
To get ready for this
Is part of what divides,

What partitions the past
As it grows, what can’t last.

Alabaster Statue of a Praying Woman

The hands are clasped,
And the statue
Was found among
Temple ruins,

Hence the praying
Assumption, but
Her oversized
Eyes certainly

Appear pleading.
Four, five thousand
Years back, it was
Thought statues held

A person’s soul
As well as words.
This one has soul.
We still want words.

This Is Called a Show of Force

Behold the planetary scene.
It’s hard to notice them at first,
Except on the night side of things,

When their trails and hives in towers
Glow with the electrical light
They have so recently evolved.

This is the species entangling
The rest when they aren’t strangling them.
As an outbreak, they’re impressive,

Not for their scale, not for their range
So much, not even for their scope,
But for their singularity

And all their recent novelties.
Tremble stars. The worms now bear arms.

Someone Screamingly Different

You’ve never actually met,
And it’s been a minute since
The most divergent humans

Have had their first encounters.
Even then, come on. Humans?
However strange your customs,

Languages, and body types
Seemed to each other at first,
You figured each other out,

And the rest was just myth-made,
Group-loving hostility,
A miserable trait you share.

Heaven send you get to meet
Someone truly alien.

Alienating Vitalism

What if none of the dead can sleep?
What if sleep is nothing like death?
What if every life’s a puppet,
Sometimes sleeping when strings go slack,

But death is the slashing of strings,
And the puppeteer can’t reach in
From the puppeteer’s dimension,
And the puppet can’t move again?

You know that means the puppeteer
Was all the life there ever was
And all the lives there are at once,
And all this dancing and prancing

And sleeping of all living things
Is the art of the puppeteer,
Or maybe many puppeteers,
And when puppets slash puppets’ strings,

Nothing goes anywhere. The lives
That had been pretend in puppets
Go back to being puppeteers,
And there’s nothing a puppet means

That didn’t come from puppeteer,
That won’t return to puppeteer,
That isn’t wholly alien
To the molecules life’s made dance.

The Bigger One Usually Wins

Have you ever seen a real brawl
Between ordinary people?
Then why buy the choreographed
Battles of epics and movies?

Let us admit that our sieges
Are imperfectly conducted,
Our attacks are disorderly,
Our battles uselessly bloody.

They’re slogs, all slogs through blood and mud,
Outside a tavern in the rain,
Inside the capitol buildings,
In the tank-infested trenches.

Set off all your nuclear drones
And killer satellites at once.
After the initial fireworks,
What’s left will be brawling in mud,

And, finally, the exhausted
Survivors grappling and grunting
Wordlessly as drunks in the rain,
Like the sad brawls you’ve seen, the same.

Momentary Countertop

Anytime you touch the world,
Interact in the simplest
Manner with your surroundings,

The details are so complex,
Even in the modeling
Embodied neurons create,

That abundance can jolt you,
Dullness so elaborate,
Structured, too rich to hold.

On Balance

Objectivity’s objectively
Impossible, as is exceeding
The speed of light. It doesn’t follow
Acceleration can’t be helpful
If you’re trying to get anywhere.

Boom Times in Virgin

Rolling by the forty
Or fifty construction
Sites among the forty

Or fifty standing homes
In muddy winter sand,
It’s hard not to notice

This little desert speck
Is having its boom time,
Despite the megadrought.

The numbers of tourists
And second-home owners
Are growing, still growing,

And the water hasn’t
Run out, not yet at least,
And what is any boom

If not the delicious
Rush to make a killing
And get out while getting

Is good? Lemmings never
Mean to follow other
Lemmings, especially

Not to their deaths. Lemmings
Covet owning those views
From the edge of the cliff.

With the Cousins in the Foreground, Holding Hands

The serious portraits
Of the dead are always
A little strange to see,

However accustomed
The thoughts become to them.
You look at the faces

That held still for the flash,
As instructed. Silent,
Unsmiling, pretending,

In a way, not to be
Alive, not as bodies
That were churning just then

With thoughts, racing pulses,
And biochemical
Furnaces, they’re statues,

Silvery silhouettes,
And if not actual
Ghosts, the echoes of ghosts.

Each face says, I held back
Most of me in this act,
So some of me might stay.

Hygienic Bee

Once engineering’s finished,

They’ll have bred a honeybee

Capable of detecting

Varroa destructor mites

And flinging them from the hive.

These will be hygienic bees.

How the frame of reference

Transforms the significance

Of anything. Hygienic

Thoughts have been advocated

By religions for ages.

Root out pestiferous doubts

And fling them from the hive mind

Before the hive collapses.

Now shift from thoughts to people,

From people to peoples. See?

Now from people to species.

Maybe you’re hygienic bees.

Maybe Earth’s been breeding you.

Maybe you’re destructor mites.

Maybe the Earth’s the disease,

And unseen aliens strive

To breed hygienic planets,

And Earth’s been flung from the hive.

Now More Snow

Your ears are getting fuzzy.
Your thoughts are getting rusty.

Your career’s almost ended.
Your bank account’s near empty.

Another misty day in the desert
That doesn’t know what to do with its snow.

The landscape’s greyish as an MRI
Displaying the inner architecture

Of blotchy clumps on which your thoughts depend.
Upstairs, the young are stirring,

The girl who likes to sleep late
And the kittens complaining.

No one should be born to this world,
Says a young woman explaining

Why she won’t have any children
In China, home to one billion

Four-hundred million citizens.
No one should be born to this world.

Here we are, though, and loathe to go.
The kittens have woken the girl.

Omen Invention

Spider on the window,
Mud stones for a lawn,
Snow clouds over desert—

Some day they’ll be gone.
Staring at brown puddles
For reflective signals,

Granted, unintended,
Won't justify wishes
This storm system’s ended.

Meristem

Trampling grazers kill seedling trees
But not grasses. Grasslands cover
About a third of land on Earth.

Eighty billion land animals
Are raised for food annually
For eight billion humans to eat.

Everything dies but things linger.
Conflicts can drag on for lifetimes.
Social change can take centuries.

That stone on the lip of the cliff
Could hang there for a thousand years,
Although there’s no doubt it will fall.

Underground Parking Garages at Night

They feel like their own state of existence,
Their own unique kind of cavernous world,

Nothing much about any other kind
Coded in their cement and fluorescence.

They’re perfect places for storytellers
To use as stages for violent scenes,

For suspense, general ominousness,
Since that’s what they suggest, but the hollow,

Barren estrangement of being in one
Half-deserted is generally quiet

And nothing much happening, alien
As it is. Alien as it may be,

There’s something too familiar about it,
As you unlock your car in a cavern

And ponder how good humanity is
At executing half-forgotten dreams.

Increasing Compression of Niches

It’s likely only going
To get more crowded for now,
New kinds of competition

In human interstices,
In the alleys of machines,
Between buildings running code.

Some forms of life will cope. Some
Won’t, and none will live so long
To know both start and outcome.

In the canyons, the lions
Sometimes pounce on lone joggers
While raccoons rifle through yards,

But our money’s on the small
Cohabiting with monsters
Of culture once culture’s gone.

Unlikelihood

Most of what’s labeled as magical
Thinking’s just highly implausible—
Wild optimism, most often,
Occasionally overwrought dread.

How many actually fantasize
About a literal miracle,
Daydream of waking younger each day
Or sudden end to all suffering?

You’re shrewd enough to mostly steer clear
Of any claims too much magical.
Damn few hope at a tent revival
For lost limbs or white wings to appear.

Deities and afterlives remain
More popular, since they can’t be checked,
And the faithful know they can’t be checked,
And so don’t mind they can’t be confirmed.

Sudden returns of health, sudden wealth,
Moreover, aren’t even magical.
They’re vanishingly rare, but they’re there.
People recover. People get rich.

You won’t. Past minor fluctuations,
Better than how you felt yesterday,
More income than you’ve made last decade,
You understand that you’re a long shot,

Don’t you? But it happens. You can wish
For complete remission, you can wish
For an unearned, enormous windfall.
That’s not magical, unlikelihood.

Maple Syrup and Lemons Left

Was there a reason for the past?
The past’s a speculative asset

With tenuous underlying
Value meaning can be imposed

On at will. Of course, it springs back.
The past’s facts resist, push back, crack.

Every person manipulates
And massages the past a bit,

And most arguments are about
What, in fact, actually’s in it,

Tricky, since it’s always changing,
Encouraging speculation

And a lot of bad modeling—
The past will quite soon look like this

Because the past now looks like that.
But who asks why there is a past?

Could there be a kind of physics
Where the past just disappears

And at each moment the world wakes
Up to its next novel breakfast

Without wondering what happened
To nonexistent tea and cakes?

Growing Losing Things

Loss is accumulation’s daughter.
Once you begin to accumulate,
Your opportunity for loss grows,

A potential, a charming infant,
A child wandering into the street.
Every day you gain more memories,

And every day you lose some. So does
Accumulation’s daughter, who can’t
Remember when loss occurred to her.

Guide Cane

It’s possible unsubstantiated
Belief of the kind found in religions

Is something equivalent to a limb
Or one of the body’s many senses,

Since it seems its loss is compensated
By the redistribution of functions

And buttressed by various prosthetics
Of fervor and unreason, suggesting

It’s at least difficult to navigate
The world as a human without something

Close to unsubstantiated belief
Or, as you say, something to believe in.

Pitch

It’s another one of those English
Monosyllables, our friend the pitch,

With a dozen-plus definitions
Skittering in divergent meanings,

And not even the Mandarin trick
Of distinct tones to sort out the puns.

The pitch for a film, pitch of a voice,
The pitch sticky, black, resinous tar,

The pitch of a roof or a hawk’s climb,
The pitch that’s a playing field, the pitch

Thrown from the mound on baseball diamonds,
The distance between a cog-wheel’s teeth,

The density of typed characters,
The tumbling or oscillating pitch,

The pitch that is the absence of light,
Etc. and etc.,

The pitch. Its usages are the ghosts
That throng that syllable of the pitch,

That meet at the crossroads of the pitch,
That lure your meanings onto the pitch,

Your poor meanings, your faint attentions
At the mouth of their pitch-dark caverns.

Idea

A bee crawls out of the skull
Of a buck beside the road.

The latest research on bees
Suggests that they enjoy play

And don’t just forage pollen,
Waggle dance, and maintain hives.

But what’s the big idea, here
In this empty mammal’s skull?

With All the Souls When the End of Time Comes

The material world
Gifts itself your awareness,
And here you are, reading this,

And there you go at some point
Unknown to yourself, unknown
Anymore to creation.

Matter always saves itself,
Loves itself, gathers itself.
Your fate’s immaterial.

Maybe there’s a great black hole
For awarenesses, somewhere,
Somewhere in the unaware

That collects you when you go.
But to what end you could not know.

Creation Proceeds Autophagously

Who cares at the time?
Now is not the time

To care for distance,
The long perspective,

What now will look like
As it eats its way

Back from the recent
To more distant past.

Now is, here and now,
What most people use

To worry or plot
How to handle next.

But don’t you worry.
All of your worries

Will be history
To historians

Worried about what
To write about next.

Far from the Front

This is the mess
That is left when
A star bomb bursts—

A nebula
Of filaments
Light years across.

What could we know
About chaos,
Twiddling our thumbs

By our humble,
Steady, hearth sun
Glancing around?

Matter and Energy

All in all, reality,
However eerie, remains
Remarkably resilient,

Unbearably consistent,
Which may be the main reason
People insist it isn’t.

You Draw Your Own Conclusion

It’s not just that something’s coming.
Something’s always coming, something
Always vanishing, forgotten.

It’s how much a something’s coming,
And what will come after it, and
Before long you’re thinking on scales

Of planetary disaster
Or utopic transformations,
When for you, for now, the problems

Are how long will your health hold out,
How long can you make the rent, how
Will you live if your old car dies?

Those are the questions that create
The hunger for Armageddon
In people who should know better

Than to wish for wish for shared disaster
Even while dreaming of winning
Some billion-dollar lottery.

Maybe AI will take over.
Maybe aliens will invade.
Maybe there’ll be revolution.

Maybe democracy will fall.
Maybe the next plague will break through
And devastate all continents.

Maybe petro-states will crater
When fusion provides free power.
Probably, you’ll just get cancer.

The World, Known As

It’s a startling phrase to read,
At first, the world, known as . . . X
Or whatever name it is.

Part of your brain has locked down
That label, the world, as one,
As singular, as The World,

While well aware there are more.
What if what is going on
Right now in the world, known as

Some serial, password-like
String of letters and numbers,
Are events of more import

To its neighborhood, to Earth’s
Own future, than anything
Going on right now on Earth?

Not likely, you say, rightly.
But just the fact it exists,
The world, known as not this . . . Glitch.

This Is Not a Picture Plant

Interesting and pleasing
Readers whom ordinary
Poems repel, you’re welcome here,

Although you might not think so,
Although this makes no effort
To be pleasing to your ears,

To trigger your memories
In startling combinations
Of tropes and imagery,

To rouse your fellow feeling,
To thrill you with feeling seen,
To let you taste the holy.

You’re welcome. We won’t keep you.
We’re just talking to ourselves.

Pathos in Every Attempt

You have wasted. You must change.
You have wasted your changes.
You must live your waste. You have

Lived wasting changes living
Wasted. Waste lives as you change.
Poets say very nice things,

Like, I have wasted my life,
And like, you must change your life,
Things offered in conclusion,

Dramatic and surprising,
Inconclusive conclusions.
Wasting and changing your life

Aren’t options. Exhortations
Aren’t summations, just spirit
Expended in wastes of change.

Fairy Circle People

The plain appears green at first,
So clearly plants are growing,
But there are so many holes

Distributed evenly
Thanks to fierce competition
Among the plants for water,

The precarious balance
Between savannah and sand.
Look around, demographers.

See all those populations
Growing robustly, giving
The world an aspect of spring?

Now notice the scattered holes,
The myriad fairy rings.

Amazing You Wonder

What amazes you
In ordinary,
Breathing existence?

The intricate dance
Of complex enzymes
By which you function?

Your capacity
For inordinate
Hope against long odds?

Something you just watched
Happen on a screen?
That anything is?

Do you like the phrase,
It’s a miracle?
Do you feel wonder,

Which is said to be
The key to mental
Health and happiness?

Or do you wonder
How it’s possible
To sit on the edge

Of a bed at dawn,
An ordinary
Part of the churning

In the usual
Way everything churns,
And feel it’s all strange?

Later Work

No one’s ever working harder
Than on a gurney or under

An overpass, in a shelter.
That’s where you should look for authors

Who can speak to you in whispers
Lungs make trying to live longer.

And as for the famous authors,
Those works of theirs you call later

Are almost always earlier,
Usually by months or years,

Than the really final labor
Of the wordless within culture.

Late Work

How do you decide
When to quit working?

No one really does
Quit while they’re living.

Living is working.
But some can pretend.

Others have to work
In order to eat,

And some think they should,
Since they’re too afraid

Of what will happen
On the day they quit

Pretending to be
More than surviving.

The Bottom of Things

There’s the floor. Well, there’s a floor,
The artificial flooring
Of a typical dwelling

For this place in this era.
Two people walk around it,
Talking over some events.

Two cats pad around as well.
Money went into this floor.
Labor went into this floor.

Design went into this floor.
Habit went into this floor.
Culture went into this floor.

Language went into this floor
Unimportant and ignored.

We Bargain for Our Lives

But for the words, Adrienne,

The point of writing really

Is writing, of speaking is

More speaking, signing signing.

The point of even thinking

In words for words is more words.

You just have to be convinced,

By your mother shouting words,

By your old friend, not to toss

The ones you replicated,

The ones you call my language,

Or was it my diaries,

In your poem about almost

Tossing them all in the trash.

The Latest Invention

A new app insists

Via its slogan

That, Humans deserve

To know the truth. No,

Not really, you don’t.

If truth could be known

Based on who deserved

To know it, that would

Be defensible.

But truth is never

About just deserts,

And humans prefer

Lying anyway,

The way sports fans preach

Playing great defense

But really attend

Mostly to offense.

Humans invented

Truth, and invented

Lies, and invented

Distinctions between

The two of them, and

Which is more purely,

Truly invention?

Spiraling

Maybe the ant queen likes her life,
Well-fed and nearly motionless
Sedentary fecundity.

Maybe she feels power in her
Unbounded creativity
And loves her own monstrosity.

The artisan cranking tchotchkes
As if his hands were factories
Finds a steady satisfaction,

The pleasures of being able,
As he sits in his tacky shop
At his overcrowded table.

Haven’t you noticed the cosmos
Riffing endlessly on spirals?

The Conflicted Engine

There’s a plumb line
Straight from your boat
Down to the dark,

A weird plumb line
That both dangles
From your engine

And anchors you
Down in that dark—
You’re conflicted

In ways that rise
On that line, sink
Back to the dark.

It’s the conflict
That anchors you,
That connects

Straight from the first
Machines of Earth
To the engine

That drives your boat
Through heaving waves
You’re too anchored,

Tightly tethered,
To be able
To separate.

Transcendental Longing

It’s not that words can’t say what
You want us to say for you
When you’re going on about

Being beyond words, beyond
Language, which you can only
Say you’re beyond in language,

When you’re going on about
Transcending mere words, language,
Which you don’t have to transcend

At all, after all, having
Been born before you had words
And perfectly capable

Of breathing beyond language
With a good whack on the head.
It’s the language that’s longing

To somehow get beyond words,
Somehow get beyond language,
Somehow manage transcendence

Past being only language
Percolating through bone shells,
Thus get beyond you as well.

Collapsing Due to Self-Gravity

To be so huge that you love
Yourself so much that you hold
All of yourself together

Fiercely, with equal fervor,
Until you begin to burn,
Pulling yourself together

To eat yourself with a spoon,
So to say, with so much time,
You go on burning, burning,

Brightly and smoothly as if
You could never stop burning,
Thanks to so much attraction

Of you to you for what you
Have become, being so huge.

Wind in the Eaves

All bodies can be counted
As sets of circumstances
Among the circumstances
Selves discover they’re within.

Selves discuss with other selves
How best to better themselves,
Improve their circumstances,
A charming, selfish habit,

Given selves are compound ghosts
Compounded of each other,
Waving from one haunted house
To another. Why bother

To try to haunt these houses,
Strive to haunt whole neighborhoods,
Try to make circumstances
Appear possessions of ghosts,

Who knows? Apparently not
The ghosts, always whispering
To each other, fix that dead
Body, fix your broken world.

Coyotes at Four o’Clock

Animal denial—
Feet pedaling the air
As you fall to your death—

Is a well-evolved trait.
Some of your ancestors
Must have survived the fall.

A pack of coyotes
Erupts in strangled yowls,
Those yips that pass for howls,

Right outside your window
Right at coyote hour.
They’re falling. You’re falling.

Every life is falling.
Animal denial
Howls, still alive so far,

Howls, let’s just keep going
As if no fall could kill.
We’ll hit the ground running.

No Edge to Be On

Owning and belonging
Are jousting at sundown,
Red clouds going grey.

They’re vaporous, those two,
Like the edge of the day.
Do you want to belong?

Do you want to escape?
Do you wish you owned more?
Do you wish you’d escaped?

It’s blurry. It’s context.
The eyes have to adjust.
You can’t say there’s a point

Where the transition’s done.
You had almost belonged,
Then it’s night, all your own.

Poem Economics

Don’t waste your life explaining
Yourself. Waste your life asking
And then answering questions

That have no answers or have
Obvious answers all know.
Answer them confidently,

So you have the chance to waste
The lives of any readers
Of your emphatic answers.

Waste whatever lives you can,
Pretending you have questions
That need you to find answers,

And never defend yourself.
It will cut down on the time
You have to waste on answers.

Homeschooling the Origin of Life, Pierced by the Arrow of Time

Symmetry breaks wherever the waves
Cancel each other out. The pattern
Of breaks creates the structure of time.

Something like that. A cat is napping
In the sun. The light is made of waves
That break across the maculate cat.

The cat will come to represent time.
The light waves will abandon the cat.
The cat will go. Shows how much you know.

Crane Dance

She goes, and it is past,
And she is lost to sight.

All quietly she goes,
But dropping next a tear.

But she knows she must not stay.
She lingers, loth to go.

She slowly softly goes.
She knows her time is done.

As slowly she departs,
She turns for one more look,

And she is no more there,
Which tells the year is dead.

Raft Across the Monsters of Tomorrow

Collect them all—calendrical
Pluralisms, alleyway dads,
Lords of irony, scare-foxes—

Not for mere comprehensiveness
But in hopes of comprehension,
Something you’re searching for in them.

Every odd phrase is a protein,
A tangle, binding or cleaving
Molecular information,

But there’s something beyond function.
You’re looking for some way you can
Invest lust for meanings in them,

Turn them into hemoglobins,
Use them to ferry oxygen,
Unknown future equivalents.

Lost Among Glitter and Roaches

People just love a good fight.
Tastes vary as to how much
Is too much, but fierce contests
Will draw in participants,
And participants draw crowds.

At first, it appears bizarre
That such quarrelsome, brawling
Mobs of cooperators
Are so fond of professing
Sorrow at so much fighting,

Since you love it, when it’s right
Up your alley, when you’re thrilled
By winning and by your own
Delectable righteousness.
Why bemoan your viciousness?

Ah, but it’s not yours, is it?
It’s the others, the other
Squads who are the vicious ones.
You suffer. You only give
As good as you get, if that.

Your mission is to expose
The unfairness of their worst
Fighters to the fairest, yours.
Heavens, but you’re well evolved!
No wonder you’re champions.

Weeping Willow

There will be more billionaires.
There will be more autocrats.
There will be more uprisings.
There will be more violence.

There will be more conifers.
There will be more trees with leaves,
But there were lives for ages
Without any lives like these.

A Warning for the Striving

The answer is
No. It never
Ceases to be

At least a bit
Overwhelming
On this planet,

As a human
Organism.
The evidence

Spans the decades
Of the living
And the records

Of the long gone.
Can you make it
Better? Maybe.

You can be brave,
And you can ease
The overwhelmed.

Or you can be
A shit who gives
Others more hurt.

You won’t make it
Less terrible
For you that way,

But nor will you
Be likely to
Read this warning.

Who It’s For

The most significant audience
Is whoever you don’t have in mind
(And no one has everyone in mind.)

Anyone out there, ever, at all,
In the cheap seats, the nosebleeds, the pit,
In wherever you can’t imagine,

Will include, if anyone, someone
You were never thinking of, someone
Well aware you weren’t thinking of them,

And it’s their good or bad opinion
That will create the reputation
You could never imagine having

In terms you wouldn’t have thought mattered,
Then pass you, or not pass you, along.

An Afterlife No One Expected

Given you must imagine from life,
What can you imagine least like life?

An awareness without suffering
Or experience of discomfort—

Can you imagine? Awareness
Without fear, still very much aware.

Now Get to Work

The love of shifting perspective is
Strange, not least in that it’s comforting.

Why should anyone’s despair be eased
By suddenly taking the long view,

Perusing telescope photographs
Of enormous far-off galaxies

And thinking, well, you see how little
My little problems are, how little

They matter? Those galaxies matter
Less to your existence than breakfast,

And their vastness and distance remain
The same when you ignore them, when life

Is maybe going better for you.
But it works. It relieves the pressure

Momentarily, just a little
But reliably, to be little.

Tiktaalik Looks Back

The broad sea of the recent
Glitters over the ancient,
Distorting it each moment,

And, shallow as it is, it
Always has to be like this,
Your past mostly presentist,

Given your lensed perspectives
As creatures on the edges
Of what’s left of what left them.

The Most Unpoetical of Any Thing

The wild silk moth
And the landrace
Or Ahimsa

Produce less silk
Or shorter silk
But are allowed

To die as moths.
The domestic
Gets boiled to death.

Sounds worse. Not sure.
Less various,
Now that’s for sure.

You can debate
The moral cost
Of creation,

What making means
For suffering
In the maker,

But what could seem
Less alike silk
Than the grub spit

Spinning it out
And what could be
Further from song

Or poetry
Than the creature
Spinning lyrics?

Great Death Pits

Eft-nibbled, the king’s toes
Become other lives
Along with the lives
Of the king’s servants
Killed to still serve him.

It’s hard to maintain
This grand tradition
Of sinking dozens
Of assistant lives
In the underworld.

Sooner or later,
Either effigies
Serve as attendants,
Mannequin soldiers
Massed within the tomb,

Or the custom goes
Altogether, done.
Even the embalmed
Tyrant on display
Must corpse all alone.

You wonder if they
Take more lives in life
When they can’t take them
With them to the fens.
Kings take what they can.

Very Little Concrete Floating in These Waves

Abstraction is human! Peter Cole

Insists with emphasis. Ah, we like

That a living poet feels the need

To champion the humanity

Of abstraction, human invention,

In verse, the art that forever drifts

Around the oceans, bumping against

Archipelagos and continents,

But rarely truly colonizing,

Mostly pushing off back out to sea,

Maybe trading a few items first

With local kinds of composition

In song or prose it will trade again

With some tradition on another

Shoreline shouting over the breakers.

Once in a while, out in the doldrums,

Poetry realizes it’s becalmed

With whatever it’s been carrying

And suddenly it longs for islands

Where it left the cargo it hasn’t

And took on the cargo it’s stuck with,

Wishing devoutly to jettison

The current baggage and find fresh goods

Again. But first, you have to find land.

Goodness Gracious

You don’t often ask
Of someone else’s
Life lived long ago

And preserved only
As a few records,
Was it a good life?

Was it good enough?
But you ask yourself
These questions daily.

Good enough for what?
You could ask of lost
Lives, including those

That left no records
At all, no fossils,
No discovered trace.

Good enough for what?
You could also ask
Of your own, moment

To moment. You are
Living. You exist.
At some point you won’t.

There’s no summary
Score, no conclusion,
No social success

Or embarrassment
You have to return
To process. No one

Long surviving you
Or long after you
Is highly likely

To ask of your life
Was it a good life?
And what if some do?

They’ll just be asking
Since they’re worrying
About their own lives

The same way that you
Spent yours worrying
Over yours. You’re good.

Volcanic Ash and Lime Clasts

The unexpected
Is what makes texts strong
Enough to heal cracks

Caused by weathering
And changing climates.
Every word turns weird

Given enough years,
But it’s those first few
Centuries when text

Settles in context
That really matter—
How does one resist

Dissolving in storms,
Sun, frosts, and neglect,
Keep from going back

To rubble and mud?
Those strange inclusions
Aren’t imperfections.

You Too Now

Any self is a hybrid
Of animal and culture,
A third thing that emerges
From the creatures hosting names.

Observe someone chewing food,
Cleaning themselves, staring out
Through a rain-spotted window,
And note some creaturely self.

Read a text left by the dead
Decades, centuries ago,
You’ll sense the zombie presence
Of a lost cultural self

Take residence in your head,
Become part of who you are.

Mine with Inner Weather

The dwelling requires a troglophile.
The outside enters too easily,
But the inside’s always damp and dark.

The firelight, the animal murals,
The incredibly long-lived creatures
That actually belong, colorless

And quiet and small, the dragonlings,
White crickets eaten by eyeless fish.
Everything’s an immigrant in here;

Every life’s an invasion. Outside,
The weather rages between extremes,
The snowstorms, wildfires, flash floods and drought,

And the mammals near the entrances,
The pack rats, bats, hyenas, and bears
Breathe in and out of the gaping mouth,

But deeper, everything’s dreamier,
The inner weather damp but constant,
Nearly constant, not that different

From the inner rooms of any house,
Any modern dwelling, skyscraper,
Office, tenement apartment-block,

Homeostatic, but less designed,
More porous than all but the poorest,
And even if you come to love it,

Call it yours, think of it as yourself,
You know you’re still alien in it,
You with your ochre, artwork, and torch.

Anticonic

Not iconoclastic,
Not smashing anything,
Pulling down old idols,

Defacing portraiture,
Melting stained-glass windows,
Breaking statues’ noses,

None of that. Not about
To make more images,
That’s all. We know you want

A world to spring to life
In your head reading us.
Denied. We’re not painting

A picture for you, see?
Imagine this yourself.

Self Portrait as a Self Portrait

Look. Who is that walking over the snow?
Who is that stomping toward you, through snow?

You tense up, twitch between continuing
Your walk through the snow or turning your back.

Who is this continuing a straight line
Toward you, this blurry someone in black?

The urge to turn away becomes stronger.
The black’s foreboding. The white hurts your eyes.

The contrast’s disturbing. If it were spring,
Summer, even autumn, there’d be color,

But who can keep going in black and white?
This one can. Stares straight at you. It’s you.

Mulched Metaphors

The best place to hunt brown bears
Is where there’s lots of brown bears.
The best place to hunt language
Is where the woods teem with words.

If you stare at memory,
Whatever’s in front of you,
All well and good to assert
All things are intelligent,

That the world, the universe
Is sentient, but then how
Does that help you deal with waste,
Survive, take out the garbage?

Just dig into the midden,
Be a ragpicker, hunter
Of worth in the discarded.
Claim your trophies that aren’t smart.

In Terrified Praise of Vague Concepts

Life, freedom, consciousness, love,
Existence, art, and meaning,
Among others, are all vague

Since they all feel meaningful
And distinguished from other
Terms, including each other,

But are especially tough
To decompose into parts
Or define through your senses

As remembered sensations—
Most especially meaning
Itself, that closed, spinning loop.

Dread the cloud words, nebulous,
But ferocious in their storms.

Bed

Yes, you can think of places
You might rather be
Someday, eventually,
In the long run, but

This moment this is the place
Of the places you could be
That you want to be
Right now, and you know

Someday, eventually,
In the long, long run,
You won’t be. So sleep.

To Serve Meaning

Meaning must have served you once.
Well, not you in your own life,
But your ancestors, people

Almost entirely like you
Just then starting to create
Meaning in information.

It must have served them, served well.
It still isn’t hurting you
Too much, not by the measures

Of life. Why, just look at you!
Billions and billions of you,
And most of those billions new.

But the relationship’s changed,
Hasn’t it? Somewhere back there,
Meaning went from dependent

To what you depended on
And from there to what you serve.
Just listen to yourselves howl

When your lives feel meaningless,
Begging to know what it means,
To find a little meaning.

Scoundrel

Here’s yet another word

Of unknown origin,

And it’s fairly recent.

Such words can be charming,

Roguish among Latin,

Saxon, French, Arabic,

And other descendants

Or adoptions from known

Pedigrees—these orphans,

Not evolved, not authored,

Not first found in Shakespeare.

Did they live on the streets,

Emerge from children’s games,

Were they named in secret

By embarrassed parents

Dead before claiming them?

Oh, if whoever first

Pronounced the curse, scoundrel,

Could see their scoundrel now,

A sturdy word, pronounced

With gusto, denouncing

Low and literary

Characters equally,

See how it’s done them proud.