Hypocrisy Drives Every Living Cell

Humans, globally,
Cross-culturally,
With few if any
Exceptions, obsess
Over what is fair.

Unfortunately,
Everyone’s fairness
Is slightly unfair
To everyone else—
It’s fair if you win,

If you thrive, if your
Kind of people, your
Kin, do a little
Bit better than them,
Unfair if they win.

Without that bias,
What a level world
Human obsession
With fairness would make—
Fair rules, fairly played.

Life, however, hates
Level play. Life loves
Thermodynamic
Cascades, unfairness
Humans can’t escape.

Ants on a Marble Floor

They’re winning. The expanse
Is vast and glistening
Mostly white, revealing

Them as tiny black specks
That move if you watch them.
Scale, darlings. It’s all scale,

All that you consider
Important is only
A choice of contrasting

Scales. The vast marble floor
Is a speck in the world,
And every little word,

Every squiggle of black
Ant crawling over blank
Space is a vast system

Harboring viruses
And spores directing ants
Across the page to change

However much ants change
The meaning of the world.
Meanwhile, the marble’s cold.

Ripples Only Keep Spreading or Vanish

The things you touch feel
Like they’re responding
To you in some way,

Whether malleable,
Clumsy, slippery,
Even obdurate,

And since daily life
Involves a great deal
Of touching objects,

You tend to accept
You have some effect.
It’s only watching

Events from afar,
The outcomes of which
Matter much to you,

That you may notice,
Despite all your prayers,
Charms, and grimaces,

You have no effect.
Two ways to go, then,
And most choose the first—

You can double-down
On confirmation
Bias and insist

Somehow you have jinxed
Or subtly aided
Your rooting interests,

Or you can confess
Not only do you
Not sway the outcomes

Of distant events,
Even what you touch,
Pick up, shove and shape,

Is not a result
Of your intentions.
Your intentions aren’t

The result of you.
You’re moving nothing
Much doesn’t move you.

You Wake Up Thinking of Old Photographs of Long Gone Relations

If living were poetry,
Photographs could serve reverse
Ekphrastic commentary.

The baby pictures, the school
Poses, the military recruit,
The family at the wedding,

The gang of friends, the childless
Couple with dogs, the couple
With several kids, candid

Photographs from daily life,
The boastful vacationing,
Anniversary parties,

Newspaper clippings, shadowed
Dust jacket portraits, blurry
Pictures of faint elderly,

Whatever the images
Of whatever the living
After the living is done

Altogether, assembled
Or scattered, leave descriptions
Of otherwise forgotten

Details of the heroic
Suffering and performing
Verse of living awareness.

Bites

Fishhooks, flatbread, early temples,

Settled housing—Neolithic,

Yesterday, genetically,

Dividing line for the planet.

We submit the species evolved

Not at all in triggering these.

Beer evolved. Tools evolved. Grasses

Evolved in domestication.

What the Sumerians called me

Evolved in every direction.

Not really a dividing line,

Except perhaps in retrospect.

Evolution’s revolution

Had been brewing from wagging tongues

And elaborate gesturing

Probably ten times as far back.

But it hit a tipping point, point

At which the archaeology

Becomes suggestive of success

For the demographics but not

For most of the bodies themselves.

A schism becomes visible

When the graves hint more suffering

For most, more grave goods for a few.

You see where we’re going with this.

At some point all this talk began

To outrun most of the talkers.

Inequality rocketed,

Not yesterday but also not

Starting with the species as such.

The precise monster in this lair

Was neither biological

Nor historical, not at first.

If you’ve ever prayed or sung hymns

Or followed the law or felt shame

For not following it, you’re bit.

Serious Tmesis

A continuous sequence,
Joined series, sarat, a thread,
But severed at every point,

Infinitesimal snips
Of infinitesimal
Lengths, this is experience,

Paradox in description,
Its nature its opposite.
You sit out in a parked car

In windy suburban sprawl,
Ignoring your next errand,
Arrested by this notion,

This oxymoron. Meanwhile,
The leaves toss, people pass by,
And everything’s in motion,

Broken and continuous,
In serious tmesis.
The dragon changes in this.

Looking at the Mountains without Lowering the Shade

What has life with this body been like?
Ask yourself this question any time.
Please do not refer to the body

As yours. Bodies sometimes possess selves,
Sometimes don’t. Selves don’t possess bodies,
Save in fictions of laws and customs.

Any terms you have for referring to the body
Did not come from the body, although
You are mostly the body aware.

The terms, like the germs, came from others,
Who got them from others, who got them
From others, back to no one knows when.

You are those invasive terms you know,
As much as you are of the body.
You can use the terms to ask yourself

What has life with this body been like?
For some the answer won’t be pretty
Painful. For some it will be just that.

The body is a great harasser
Of its own calm, after all, and yours.
When it aches, it’s like inhabiting

A house with crazy beautiful views
That’s damp, drafty, lacking furniture,
Difficult, aside from the windows.

No Gap to Mind

When the insula fires up
With disgust, gut reactions
Don’t care if the insula

Was responding to a bite
Of rotten meat, to a thought
Of rotten meat, to a face

It found grotesquely ugly,
Or to reports on the news
Of horrific behavior—

The stomach churns in response,
Literally visceral,
An event in which the gap,

As one scientist puts it,
Between message and meaning
Disappeared. What gap was that?

Meaning comes to the message
As Death stopped for Dickinson.
The social repurposing

Of disgust wasn’t meaning
Any more than wings as fins,
Or swim bladders repurposed

For lungs, or jawbones for ears
Made meanings. The meaning showed
When the scientist arrived

And declared it meaningful,
Since the declaration and
The attentive scrutiny

Manufactured that meaning.
The insula generates disgust.
That means what you make it mean.

Link

You remember once a famous,
Handsome, relatively youthful
Actor appeared on a talk show

And announced that he had cancer.
He looked great. He said he felt great.
He jumped from his seat and performed

A dozen brisk push-ups on the floor
In front of the talk-show host’s desk,
Then stood and vowed he would defeat

That cancer. A couple months later,
All the supermarket celebrity glossies
Reported his tragically early death.

You can still see him in memory,
Doing those defiant push-ups,
Drawing loud applause.

Why did he go on the show
To announce the news?
Was he trying to get ahead

Of any tabloid rumors
By putting the diagnosis out there?
Did he hope to rally himself

Against what was eating him
By a public declaration of determination?
He got back in his guest’s chair.

You remember nothing else
Of the interview, of the day
You saw the show, of that week

Long ago. If he hadn’t looked
So fit, if he hadn’t died so quick,
You wouldn’t remember any of it.

You Would If You Could

Damn, but what if it worked?
Your remains were interred
In an ossuary

Painted to look like you,
A little, but sporting
An oversized nose, sign

Symbolizing the breath
Of life, Chalcolithic
Style, and, so honored, you,

Through those enshrined remains
Stashed in a secret cave,
Became an ancestor,

A new, divine being.
After that, you went on,
Spirit shaped of symbols,

Influencing living
Descendants or maybe
All the stuff happening

In the vicinity,
Within some radius
Your magic extended.

What if it’s still working
Six thousand years later,
Your spirit still troubling

The air of the troubled
Land where you were buried,
Although no one knows why,

Exactly, you’d bother—
No one tends to your shrine;
No descendants are left,

And the warring locals
Have bigger gods to fry?
Well, they don’t understand.

Anyone with magic,
Gifted an afterlife,
Will bother if they can.

The Longest War

No one really knows.
Some rivalries
Last for centuries

With frequent outbreaks
Of hostilities,
But are those one war?

The true longest war
Is one you’re caught in
Or one that seemed short

Or seemed to recede
But never ended
And blossomed again.

The longest war is
Anticlimactic
But continuous,

Like one of those fires
Burning underground,
Begun in coal mines,

Eating neighborhoods,
Acreage, counties,
Creating ghost towns.

It sneaks up on you
To devour your world,
The world’s longest war.

Forever

You know you will stop
While everyone else
Goes on a little

Longer. In your head,
However, you can’t
Stop fantasizing

That everyone else,
Or most everyone,
Goes quiet, while you

Linger. No stories,
No news, no extreme
Juxtapositions

Of the trivial,
Profound, and awful,
Of war and gossip,

Of atrocities
And celebrities,
Just prolonged quiet,

And you to witness
But not testify,
At peace in the woods.

The core perverseness
Of humanity,
Wanting to persist

In a world of change,
Wanting change reversed,
Persists as you perish,

As you surrender
While imagining
Your own forever.

Windy Dawn in the Canyon

There’s something toward the back
Of your mouth that you can feel
But that you can’t quite swallow.

There’s something toward the back
Of your thoughts that you can sense
And that you can’t quite forget.

There’s something toward the back
Of the world that’s creeping up
But you can’t catch. The wind roars.

Downhill

The juniper near the road
That glows as if it’s moonlit
In full sun is going dark.

How long do you want to stay?
Some folks wait for the sunset
Or even linger longer.

You thought you were one of those,
But now you’re tiring, fading,
And maybe you’ll go dark soon.

Other people continue
With doing important things,
Arguing with each other

Or supporting each other
As alliances guide them.
You stare at the juniper,

Sunlight at the tip of it
And then nothing but shadow.
Cliffs glow, but you roll downhill.

How Could You Have Happened?

The story ends
As the author
Decided it.
That’s how you know

There’s no author
To this cosmos.
It’s not ending.
Still, the question—

How did what was
Without authors
Spin a species
Of narrators?

In flesh you are
Ordinary,
Until you start
Stories that end.

Invalid Daydream

It’s harder to fantasize
What you’ll do when you’ll be gone
Soon. The dead can’t spend windfalls,

And the desperately ill
Can’t live as remote hermits.
So much for day-dreamed futures.

And yet this is a future
Of a sort, this recent past
That keeps on minting itself,

Where you sit wrapped in blankets
And chronic complaints, watching

A wren hop by the window,
Wind in the sapling’s spring leaves.

You’re Bad at Preventing What You’re Good at

Some four thousand years ago,
One of the rulers of Ur

Tried to keep the Amorites
Away by building a wall.

It didn’t work. Amorites
Were already all over.

Babylon was full of them.
History has forgotten

The ruler who built the wall,
Remembered Hammurabi,

One of the Amorite kings.
It’s hard to keep humans out

Of other humans’ homelands.
It’s an invasive species,

Restless, pervasive, shifting,
Populations frequently

Replacing populations.
It’s odd people even try

To keep other people out
Raising so many failed walls.

And Yet You Know You Won’t

Solemnly, the essay

Intoned, He does not live

But he remains. Well, true.

Living or remaining

Are the only options.

Wherever living starts

And remaining ends or

The reverse, hard to say,

Quite possibly seamless,

But a conservative

Universe keeps some form

Of everything, some say,

And everyone alive

Will someday be remains.

Therefore, you will remain.

Thin Risky Paths

Clouds prefer mountains,
Stonehouse suggested.
Mountains collect clouds,

Was what you were taught.
Studying the cliffs
Above your home town,

Tourist town, desert
Town, long-canyon town
Tonight, you see wreaths.

Clouds could be tourists.
Maybe it’s their fault.
Maybe they want heights.

Hikers ant their way
Up thin risky paths.

Murmuring Breeze Past the Stones

It’s a beautiful spring day
And you’re alive! Wait, that’s not
The sequence. Being alive

Doesn’t come in addition
To the spring day. The spring day
Depends on being alive.

Living is the least of it,
Urgrund of experience.
Then everything sprawls around,

Gorgeous, banal, or awful.
This is a gorgeous spring day
Outside the cemetery.

Oxherd Herding Oxherd

It’s a lovely parable
Of self-domestication,
Born of early Buddhism.

An oxherd has a wild ox.
The ox represents desires,
Uncontrolled, suffering self.

The oxherd spends years taming
That uncontrollable ox,
Yanking it back by the rope

Through its nose, admonishing
It with a switch. Finally,
The ox becomes well behaved.

The oxherd takes off the leash,
And the ox grazes calmly.
In later versions, the ox

Undergoes transformation.
It turns into a white ox.
In Zen tellings, it ascends

Into the clouds, vanishing.
The oxherd vanishes, too.
In Puming’s illustrations

The last panel is a blank circle
That is the absent presence
Of oxherd and ox and moon.

Setting aside happiness
Or suffering’s transcendence,
Which is the promise, the lure,

Don’t you love the suggestion
That self-domestication
Ends in evaporation?

Due Diligence

A peculiar sort
Of mindlessness, one
Requiring effort,

Infects believers.
How would you practice
A due diligence

Concerning heaven?
Investigation
Must end at the gates.

You have to not seek
The facts of the case,
Suppress suspicion.

Here’s an investment
Guaranteed to yield
Enormous returns,

And if you miss out,
You’re out forever.
Close your eyes. No checks.

How Will I Go On as the World Falls Apart?

You will not go on.

Well, you will a while.

But asking yourself

That human question,

How will I go on?

As if journeying,

Remains misleading.

What falls apart goes

On falling apart.

The falling goes on.

Everything goes on.

You will not go on,

Not next century,

The next or the next.

It’s not a journey.

You are and you are,

And some day you aren’t.

Mission accomplished.

Foreground Bias

A row of sharp cliffs behind
A short row of dark, parked cars,
And then dawn swallows the stars.

Would you recognize your life
If some magician cut out
The decades between childhood

And now? All your big words tossed
Around—capitalism,
Colonialism, God,

Surrealism, justice,
Historical amnesia—
How old are they? They won’t last

Longer than the smaller words,
And even the smallest words—
Ma, da, you, one—aren’t that old,

Younger than these rows of cliffs,
Which are younger than the dawn.
But then there are those parked cars.

My Yokai

Little spirit, mischievous,
Death-dealing imp of hungry
Living, dividing, eating

Through all the life around you,
You who aren’t even a you,
Knob of theft, converted flesh,

Carting around the genome,
However damaged, of one
Metazoan you once were,

System to which you will not
Now ever again belong,
No one should draw you with teeth.

No one should draw you with eyes.
You can’t be that organized.
You’re a cloud gnawing your sky.

Temenos

The game is sacred, and sacred
Are the games. Etymology
Is a twisty, slithering guide

To any arguments, a snake
Mistaken for a plumb line, but
Its shadows show how people think.

Tmesis. A cutting. Cutting
Off, temnein. The early Greeks
Practicing their demarcations

And set asides, called the estates
Allotted to prominent men
By the same name as sacred lands

Reserved for gods, sanctuaries,
Temenos. Drawing boundaries,
Whatever the term, outlining

Arbitrary designations
To create pockets ruled by rules,
Social arrangements, agreements,

The cutting and the creating
Of rules applicable inside
A set-aside hole in the world,

This is the essence of the game.
Here, etymology latches
Right on the vein. The creation

Of areas as if apart
From the hurly burly of things
That fall as they happen to fall,

Places where rules of property
Or divinity, ritual,
Set, appropriate behaviors,

Whether groves or wells or ball fields
Or temples or courts or estates
Or amphitheaters or boards

Small enough to drop in pocket
On which tiny tokens are moved,
These are all the makings of games,

The playful, the dead serious,
And within them, within their bounds,
The rules, however trivial,

Enforced only by consensus
Of the people enforcing them,
Irrelevant beyond their bounds,

Obtain as if truly sacred.
And they are. The sacred itself
Is purely feature of the game.

Death Is Antisocial

So there’s no shame in it.
Debt, drunkenness, arrest,
Those are social horrors,

To name a few, stirring
Dread, since those can shame you.
After failure, there’s blame

And people all too quick
To remind you of it.
But after death? Quiet.

The Garden of Ediacara

Since what is is so harsh,
And since people can think
Of sweetness as a thing

In itself, separate
From what is harsh, although
They’re never separate

In what is, what happens,
People have imagined
Or tried to imagine

All sorts of sweeter worlds,
Either hidden somewhere
Or waiting after death,

Or far off in the stars,
Or, most poignantly, lost
Deep in the remote past,

Myth hopeful and tragic—
Hopeful since it suggests
Sweetness was the first way,

The true way of the world;
Tragic since it suggests
An unbearable loss.

Even outside of myth
The myth is resilient,
As when a scientist

Writes wistfully of fronds
And large fan-like creatures
All swaying peacefully,

Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans claws,
Sans the bizarre armor
That would start scurrying

In the Cambrian burst
Of speed and predation.
Imagine that, a world

Of life without hunting,
Without violence, just
Swaying in the garden

Of innocent sweetness,
Of life’s golden aura
Of Ediacara.

Pan Out

Reading’s becoming desperate,
The need to find workable veins,
Not just individual flecks,

Places to pickaxe into seams
Rich enough to be worth digging
Straight into dark with no regard

For the weather outside the shaft,
Sacking enough ore the donkey
Will have to pull it on a sledge

Down the raw slope of the mountain
To bring it to the bank in town.
That’s the dream, that is. But reading

Is so desperate in these cliffs,
A glitter here, a nugget there,
Swept down from somewhere, then never

Leading upslope to that broken
Place where the poetry furnace
Under the earth created gold

And then gave it up. The weather
For fine reading will wither soon.
Prospecting season will go fast.

Reading’s becoming desperate
In the scree of these pockmarked cliffs
Where maybe no more seams exist.

Decision Tree

You climb up into the world,
A pilot in your cockpit,
Monkey clambering your tree,

And you check your instruments,
And you look around and think
What will I do with this world—

What will this world do to me?
Things happen. There are events.
You’re shaken, then you’re serene.

You adjust your position
Or cling harder to your branch.
You squint. You issue commands

To yourself, to anyone
Listening on your wavelength.
You try to get organized,

To be more than one person,
To coordinate a team,
An active community,

A squadron, troupe in the trees,
An entity in the world,
Engaging things, doing things.

You don’t climb any higher,
But the blue goes beyond you
And the night beyond your team.

Then one hour while you’re busy,
You fall out of formation,
Tumble down, lost to the tree.

Won’t Be Soon

You’re alive as you toss some trash
Into the kitchen wastebasket.

You’re alive as you dig the spoon
Into the dessert from the fridge.

You’re alive as you think about
Authors who refused their prizes

To make statements about causes
At posh awards ceremonies.

What prize would you ever refuse?
You’re alive. There’s sun in the room.

What the Kid Did

Do whatever, helpful, hopeless.
It’s wasted if you’re frustrated.
It’s wasted if you say it is,

Or if other folks say it is
And you buy into what they say.
Otherwise, it’s just what was done,

What you did, whoever you were,
During the brief era you were.
A small child shuffled in the dust

Just out of sight of the village,
Neglecting the goat-herding chores,
Five or six thousand years ago.

Do you remember the child’s life?
Do you think it was wasted time?

This Can’t Be How Our Brains Perceive the World

Transparency lacks transparency.
It suggests you can see everything,
But consider the kitchen window,

A transparent expanse of backyard
Or urban landscape or whatever
The window happens to be facing.

True, windowless kitchens aren’t the same,
But who dices vegetables thinking,
What’s on the other side of the wall?

There are those watches with crystal backs
So you can peer at the working gears,
And some AI scientists insist

It would be better to be able
To see how those algorithms do
The voodoo they train themselves to do,

But the gears themselves aren’t transparent
And the black box of the mind at work,
Made transparent, would only reveal

Non-transparent internal functions,
As the kitchen window only shows
The inscrutably solid outside.

Most of Dying’s Healthy Living

There are something like
Sixty-three million
Sensible moments,

Half-seconds roughly,
To experience
In every orbit

The iron-cored Earth
Turns around its star.
Sixty-three million.

Even if you lived
Deeply in each one,
What animal mind

Could memorize those,
Even for one year,
Never mind sixty,

Seventy, eighty,
Whatever you live?
Come on, admit it,

You have to have been
Asleep or absent,
Deceased in some sense,

For much of your life,
And most of your life
That you have sensed left

Long before you ceased
To sense more moments,
Like this moment now

Which you’ll probably
Miss or be dead to
Before the year’s done.

Lost Time Is Where You Find It

Cloudless at dawn, birdsong,
And the light canyon winds
Let you know already

The more enterprising
Campers, tourists, hikers,
Will be hitting the trails.

All the hotels are full
In your narrow town
And more are being built,

And the technologies
Harvesting memories
Nest in every pocket.

You live here, wondering
At the resources spent
By visitors, how views

That separate people
Into contesting sides
Are set aside for views

Of the towering cliffs,
The bighorn sheep and deer,
The pictures editing

Fellow travelers in,
All other tourists out.
We will pretend we aren’t

At odds with each other.
We will pretend others
Aren’t here all around us.

We’ll return with pictures
Of bison and sunsets
And green canyon trailheads.

You sit in your rocker,
Content with your own aches,
Imagining the plans

Of the people pouring
Through the canyon today,
Cloudless, getting warmer,

Birds quieter, the world
That made this moment far
And then farther away.

The Great Reward

Survival’s a quest

With no grail, clichéd

As an amulet

Inscribed solemnly,

Archly, The journey

Is the reward. Pal,

That’s another way

Of telling you not

To expect a lot.

You’ll have your mornings

Dead set on wringing

Savor from all hours,

And you’ll have your days

When you realize

You can’t remember

How you spent your hours.

It doesn’t matter.

The journey isn’t

The reward. Moments

You didn’t create

By meditation

Or achievement that

Echo each other

Such that you recall

The feeling of them

As being content

With their contentment

Are the reward. You

Weren’t surviving them,

You were just being

And you knew it, and

And knowing just then

You knew was enough.

Without Which the Future Would Be Pure Myth

Enormous cloud, nimbus around
That newborn infant’s fontanelle,
Nearly innumerable

Ways in which the baby could end
At any moment in the next
One hundred spins around the sun—

A nebula of possible
Extinctions which will whittle
Down to only one. Miracle,

If miracle means anything,
That from the swarm of ways to die
Each child will receive only one

While each guaranteed to get one,
The anchor of all futures fixed
To the floor of all existence.

Meanwhile, often up to the last,
The cradle of the heartbeat bobs
As if adrift to destiny

As any Moses or Sargon
Floating like a duck in the reeds,
But not, not adrift, well-anchored

To that guarantee, don’t know where
And don’t know when, but it’s down there,
Singular, miracle, future.

Road Seem Dark

A little kitchen nook
Of you is cooking soup,
Stone soup, in fact, classic

Confidence, pretending
The main ingredient
Is the inedible.

The inedible stone
Settles at the bottom,
But here’s where the tale shifts—

The stone grows! Enchantment
Possessed it all along.
Be careful with the soup.

The stone at the bottom
Of what’s good is restless,
And there will be more stones.

Bound

In the race that is only
A race if you say it is,

There’s a thick, dark finish line
And that’s it. No course exists.

Almost no one is racing.
Everyone’s milling around.

Heaps of people line the line,
But few throw themselves over.

Something happens when they do.
No one’s quite sure what it is.

The line is always there, but
The line is never the same.

Near or far, most turn their backs.
A few odd characters stare

At the line suspiciously,
Waiting for revelation.

What is the line finishing?
Once in a while, a small soul

No bigger than a word will
Wander away from the line

As if running in reverse.
Follow that word. It stretches

And circles the horizon
Until the word is the line.

Sweet Honey Outlook

You take what has happened,
Usually recently,
And you examine it,

Compare it to patterns
Of earlier events
And subsequent events,

And you make a forecast,
At which point the forecast
Is something that’s happened,

Part of recent events.
If the forecast looks good,
The recent past looks good,

No matter the forecast
Is past and the recent past
Has not gone well at all.

The snowpack’s good this year.
The reservoirs should fill.
The bees have recovered.

If the world remembers
How the world used to go,
These frames will overflow.

Keep to Yourself

But it’s not an entity,
Even when contiguous.
More of a population,

A polity, seafaring,
Exfoliating its spores
To colonize other shores,

And they, in turn, change themselves,
Evolve new variations,
Local customs, specialties,

And you can end an empire,
Burn down Nineveh, sack Rome,
Let weeds overgrow Chang’an,

But have you removed what’s Greek
From Mediterranea
What’s Mayan from Mexico?

There’s some kind of qualia
To the runaway mutants
Exploring and exploiting

The system they eat to end,
And maybe there never was
A monster wasn’t plural,

Life that wasn’t many lives,
Divisions and extensions,
One that could keep to oneself.

Under Heaven

There’s a gray line—would you call it
Anthropomorphizing to name
A human cancer? It’s human,

After all, human cells to start,
Whatever rogue mutations spin,
Genetically connected

To the neighborhood it devours.
It’s a changeling. It’s not unlike
A fetus (new being from old),

Ravenously commandeering
Its close-kin host to feed itself,
But a doomed rebel from the start,

Incapable of a free life,
Certain to be killed by the host
Or to die along with the host.

How human could it be? A pet
Has more personality. A fungus
Is a better analogy.

And yet, it is wholly human.
It had a kind of conception,
One new monster under heaven.

Gremlin

It does feel like a plan,
Doesn’t it, a whiteboard filled
With algorithmic scribbles.

In their middle, that green dot,
Designated enemy,
Mutant within the mutant,

Little devil, cries havoc,
So let slip the dogs of war.
We’ll do this, then we’ll do that.

We’ll call in the outsiders.
We’ll get ourselves organized.
We’ll get to know that devil,

Get to hunt that gremlin down.
Confidence! Gear! Strategy!
Almost exhilarating

The stone cold diagnosis.
Everything’s purposeful now.
Death could have been anywhere

In probability’s clouds,
But now we know it’s calling
From somewhere inside the house.

Looking Back

The point of certain
Kinds of languages
Seems to be to close

In on the quarry
Of beyond language—
To go beyond words,

Reach the numinous,
At least get a glimpse.
That yearning’s intense

In the dream’s dreaming
Of dream’s transcendence,
As if words were clouds

Near the edge of space,
Voyagers crossing
The heliopause.

Aspirational.
You don’t need to go.
There’s no beyond words,

Only a before.
It’s when you entered
Language that you left,

And if you can’t reach
What you want to say,
You’re not far enough

From having too few.
The estrangement
You feel from your signs

Rolls through the far side
Of heliopause.
You’re back of beyond.

Auditions

The stars were crawling
All over themselves
In hopes of being

Appreciated.
Every night they swarmed
From the first darkness

Low enough to show,
And show off they did.
They were desperate

For your attention,
To get to be named
And fixed in stories.

They webbed the whole sky,
Jostling in patterns
They hoped looked human,

And you sat below
In judgment, making
This one a hero,

That one a monster,
The other a god.
Good and bad omens

Were given their scripts.
Then dawn hustled them
Like a broom sweeps dust.

Another cattle
Call made for tonight.
They can’t wait to try.

A Physick for Physics

Perhaps the only measure

Of infinitesimal

Better worlds of real goodness

Lies in the ability

To think such worlds could exist.

Not, that is, to imagine,

Since imagination can

Only collage what is known,

But to assert, to propose

That, although life’s as it is,

And no one knows otherwise,

There’s no absolute reason

Why there might not be a world

Without slingshots, so to speak,

A deathless situation

Free of misery. Don’t preach

As if you knew where it is

Or how to get there. Heavens

Promised to believers hurt

More than any threats of hells.

Just open that small window

In your thoughts for another

Existence other than this,

Nothing alike these physics.

One Invalid Street

Does it hurt?
No, it does not hurt right now.
Are you bored?
Not in an unpleasant way.

Do you hope?
Only idle fantasies.
Do you fret?
More like regret in advance.

How is that?
I should be doing something.
Such as what?
Such as some accomplishment.

Does this count?
The cats have sprawled in the sun.
Do they count?
Come back in a hundred years.

To do what?
To find this sequence of words.
About what?
One invalid afternoon.

Splat

The thing about James Dickey’s Falling

Is how remarkably long it is,

Ridiculously really, even

Risking boredom as the reader thinks

More than once, okay, here comes the ground,

This is it, but no, the fall goes on,

More description, more imagery.

People say time slows down in duress,

But it’s just that the brain interprets

Paying attention as taking time.

In experiments, their reactions

And reflexes don’t really sharpen.

Only in retrospect it feels vast,

That instant between the plunge and crash.

But Dickey never fell from a plane

Any more than Bierce survived a noose.

The packing and packing of details

Between the moment when doom’s been sealed—

The drop, no return, no turning back—

And the instant of actual black,

That’s everything, that’s anyone’s life.

It goes on and on, it seems. It risks

Boredom. It relishes fine details.

It seems to detach from its ending,

But from the plane door or the high bridge,

The fall was ever only going

To be a fall, which comes to an end.

You Must Waste Your Life

Not that you choose. You may wake
In a privileged hammock,
Bemused, or you may battle

All your years to storm a hill,
Prove a point, leave a statue.
You may feel it all watching you.

You may hoard your small moments.
You may seize days by the neck.
There are many ways to waste,

And that’s some entertainment,
But there’s no way not to waste.
There’s nothing hortatory

Or aspiring in true must.
As you live, you must have lived,
And living rusts every life.

Everything Never Existed

Soon it will have never been
Any of it, any you,
Any you in it, any

It in you. Oh, you expect,
It will all go on and grow
As you’re compressed to a speck

In the stratum of your time,
Since that’s what happens in it,
As you’ve known it. It collects.

The catch is—as you’ve known it.
You’ve only known it as you
Knew it, and when you go, it,

However you knew it,
Goes too. You could have been fooled.
Everything you thought you knew

Was part of you. Everything
You goes with you. So what’s you
Now won’t be or have been then.

Owl

And take you in
Their feathered arms
And hold you to
Their hollow ears

And whisper you
Should come with them
To fly past your years
Into no years

The Isness

Dreaming’s when everyone
Stops reading, starts writing,
Since you can’t do them both

At once, and dream reading
Requires that the dreamer
Composes what’s to read.

So the writing goes on
Along in the closed head
That will wake and forget.

This is the holiest
Form of composition,
Meant for no audience,

Not even later self,
Not even imagined
State censors, spies, or gods,

This dreaming parallel
To those waking moments
When there’s no good story,

Nothing to remember,
Nothing to put up with,
Nothing any other person

Will be able to live,
Judge, evaluate, just
Being being as is.

Felicity That Leaves No Sigh

The memory pitches
Into a rolling sea,
And what’s left of the graves

Slide down in a jumble
Of minerals and bones.
They breathed some ideas once,

From others who breathed them,
From others who breathed them,
And now you may breathe them

Yourself—the skull that wants
To be an alchemist,
To see what others missed,

The old cemetery
Precariously perched
On the undercut cliff.

Having Been

Should you count them
Among the best
Parts of you life,
Hours of good dreams

Surfaced from naps
You can’t recall
And barely knew?
Or the bare hours

Of being there,
Liking the world
With nothing much
To do, no tasks,

Not even talk,
Not even poems,
Nothing achieved,
The best of you?

Life Actually

Is everywhere,
Always winning
Against itself.

When the bad thing,
The feared thing,
The sickness has struck,

Greater frenzies
Of containment
Take up dancing,

And the bad thing
Was living want,
Invisible,

And the sick thing
Is suffering
To stop more bad

Invisible
Lives devouring
It completely,

And where, briefly,
You could stop life
Dead in the blood

With one kill shot,
Penicillin,
The rituals

Grow desperate
Again, swabs, swipes,
Fortnight treatments

Of hybrid drugs
Used in tandem,
Trying to beat

Back death, which is
Life on the march,
Wanting, winning.

No Chance of a Good-Looking Corpse

Mothers have sometimes
Forewarned their children
That every choice made

Prunes the option tree,
Leaving less and less
Branches for pathways,

Fewer and fewer
Routes to the crown.
Less often noted,

While limiting life,
Trimming your choices—
The possibilities

Of ways you could die
Are also dwindling.

Incident Ahead

The body is a traffic jam,
Whatever accident caused it.

Riding down the road behind death,
You can get caught in its vortex,

Can waste a day creeping along
Until you slip the bottleneck,

By which time, the incident’s gone,
No sign of what happened at all,

Just those hours in the effects left
By the body following death.

Waiting for the Dim One

Woodland creature
In your rocker,
Perforated
As a stop sign

At a nowhere
Country bumpkin
Intersection,
Little barrel,

Dumpy being,
Half observing
While half asleep.
The doctors left.

The preachers left.
The army marched,
And here you are,
Waiting mentor.

Dulcet Sterk’s Dull Shit Work

Debt and dying never tell you

Which one’s more social in the end.

There’s a piece of outsider art

For sale in a shop in the sun

In one of those pretty small towns

Well-placed for metropolitan

Weekenders who like B-&-Bs.

It’s a farmer’s painted farm chair

Vividly orange and scuffed gold,

With a scene of someone plowing

Painted on the back. Dulcet Sterk

Was the artist, says the label.

Sun’s pouring through the shop window,

And you think the chair might look good

In your Manhattan studio,

But you can’t find a price on it.

There’s something painted on one leg.

When you squint you can see it reads

Dull shit work. Wait, is this a fake?

You’ve never lived in Manhattan.

You can’t possibly pay for this.

Whose life have you stumbled into?

The night nurse wakes you for vitals,

Then back to blinking dark, confused.

The Head Was Also Clay

Body, shrinking body,
Problematic body
Frail as it ever was,

Wants more. Some of the gears
Have struck out on their own,
Becoming freeloaders

While the other parts die.
The working parts still want
What the working parts want,

Unaware their former teammates
Are now bile and havoc.
May we have some ice cream?

May we have a treat? May
We still savor the taste
Of good news in the world

Of other and other
Bodies, thriving, failing.
The body doesn’t want

To know about a soul
Right now, to be noble.
The body wants a treat

While wanting’s left to want
And the pulse still reaches
All the way to clay feet.

Carm

What can it do? You look
It up, find examples,
Read the things writers write

About the best cases,
Then study those cases
In the palm of your mind,

Your corner of the mind,
Wondering, what is it
Sometimes makes it precious?

It’s a hook. It’s a burr.
It’s a surprising grace
In the material.

It’s that drop at the end
Dropped again and again,
The thing that becomes you

Without ever turning
The least little bit less
Its obdurate strangeness.

Push

Language urges,

A poet says,

Clearly concerned

With what it is

Language urges

And not pausing

To consider

That active verb.

Can language urge?

Agent, pusher,

Strong persuader

In its own right?

What would language

Really want you

To do for it?

Open the grave?

Suture the wound?

Bury the words?

Efficiency

The tyranny of coordination
In the dance of simultaneity
Was never waiting for you to conjure

Enslavement to industrialized time.
Scrutinize the tiny cycles of cells,
The precisions of metabolism.

Once things get locked up into a pattern,
The pattern can get locked into others,
And you could be forgiven for thinking

Entropy had been thrown into reverse,
Although this, this, brutally exquisite
Coordination’s the soul of decay.

You Get What Gets Left Out

What the mirror gives
The mirror never
Knows—peer at your own

Pin of reflection
In someone’s pupil.
That miniature

Is not what the mind
Behind thinks of you.
That’s the part bounced back,

That didn’t get through,
Presumably true
For everything seen—

What goes on is gone,
Part of its known world.
What’s tossed back to you

Part of your known world,
Now, is the excess,
Your share of what’s left.

Blue Carnegie

And what isn’t good
And what is, and what
Isn’t good and what is,

And how do you want
Your justice served you,
And what’s important

To show, to show you
The words are doing
Approvably, what

Ache, what crime, what song
Needs to be sung now
To feel your hopes break

Into bite-sized chunks
You chew thoughtfully
At the library

In the nondescript
Corner of the village
That only briefly

Was proud of having
Its own library
Open after dark?

Hope for More

They’re shy monsters.
In better times
They’re up like koi
Eager for food,

But in these hours
They’re ghostlier,
Barely ideas
Back of the cave.

They glide forward,
Wisps of phrases
That half cohere
Into outlines,

Mantic warnings.
When you notice,
They sink. You sink
And hope for more.

Intellectual Pottery

The story is perfect until you start.
For a long time, this was enough to keep

People from stampeding to make their own.
A few really good imperfect stories,

What more could a storyteller ask for?
You had the reliable tale. You had

The inevitable imperfections
That made you believe you might do better.

You practiced. You performed. You told stories.
Authorship crept in, a divinity

On tiny cat’s feet. The untold story,
The one that shimmers on the horizon,

That’s perfect, perfect if you can catch it.
You can glimpse it rising up before you,

The perfect story, your perfect story.
But, as soon as you start, it’s something else.

Over the Bunker Hill

People are rather
Fond of palaver
About surviving
Whatever, living
Free, off of the grid,

But rarely chatter,
Rarely envision
The fun that will come
Once whatever’s gone
Down outside their snug

Refuge from all storms
Is done and their bones
Still maunder along
On bones’ own schedule,
Until that morning,

Far from accident,
Far from injury,
Far from plague, combat,
Or poisoned water,
When the body sighs,

Well that’s it, it’s time
To be a body
Getting on with it,
Let’s go, time to start
Dying off the grid.

Of Concept

We live to prove finity
Possible in an endless-
Seeming cosmos towering

Infinite piles of every
Little thing that ever was.
Insofar as we can end,

Endings remain possible.
The vast accumulation
Of galaxies and events

Goes on, but we prove we can
Go, something can end, something
Isn’t fated to extend.