Glimmer at the Margins

There’s a blood drip coming.
Until then, there’s nothing
Much in the tank. And then?

Still not a lot. Borrowed
Physical existence.
Borrowed life, precisely.

Note to self, when you get
Out of here, research if
Donating blood results

In net gain or net loss
For the giver. Can life
Glimmer at the margins?

Bone Market for the Soul Dance

The phrase landed in a drug
Dream in a hospital bed,
One afternoon thunderheads

Piled in their linen hampers
Ready for a rinse. Outside,
The sky was just that giant.

Inside, all the giants fit.
Nothing’s infinite. The bowls
Of bone may contain the sky,

But they can’t contain it all.
The soul dances of language
Wheel and deal for elbow room.

Throw-Away Blood

The nurse calls it,
The mixed first pull,
Sets it aside,
Goes for next pull.

Information
Lies in pure stuff,
Less distracted
By faint voices.

But as always
You sympathize
With the skew whiff,
Knowing it’s not

Ever about
Information
You want, but clues
To why voices.

Lose Your Own

A friend discovers AI.
Does it have a mind?
Will she lose her own?

Humanity knows better
Than to trust other humans,
But what is this weapon?

She’s been generating
Essays and images all day.
She will lose her own.

The Body Has Other Ideas (and Yours as Well)

You think one thing,
The body is thinking.
You think nothing,
The body is thinking.

You think the body
Is thinking you don’t know
What you’re thinking.
The body is thinking.

Your thought can mingle
With other thoughts thinking
From other bodies thinking.
The body is thinking.

But your thoughts can stay
Out there, thinking without you,
Staying and mingling, after
The body’s not thinking.

Quest for Comfort

Rocks don’t. Clouds don’t. Fires don’t.
But life does. But you do.
Seek. Search out. Be hungry.

Hunger is discomfort
Motivating the search
For comfort, the long quest,

Autocatalytic,
Of dissatisfaction,
Spur to satisfaction.

Curly Spiral Galaxy

Little sunflower out there,
Flower of suns, it’s fun
To read astronomers

Calling it an island
Universe, measuring
It to about the size

Of our own galaxy
Our island universe,

As if they were units
Like planets, galaxies,
As if you could get rock

Fever from the constraints
Of being confined
To such a mere island.

You will never explore
Even the island’s shore.

The Old Man’s Nursery Rhyme

Your life is like your mother.
You can say bad things about her.
You can even try to off her.

But if someone else insults her
Or tries to take her from you,
You get mad. You fight like hell.

That’s my mother, dammit!
You can’t talk trash about her!
You certainly can’t take her.

Devotion depends on external threat
Reminding you what’s yours is yours,
Your life just like your mother.

Accounting for Cargo

Stop calling them stories.
Everyone has a rich
Account of their life and

A rich need to account
For it. But it isn’t
Personal history

In any structured sense,
Except when someone sets
Down to attempt just that.

Listen to people talk
About themselves. Listen
To how they listen more

Or less impatiently
To each other, trading
Off turns to simply gush

Information about
Themselves they find special.
Little anecdotes may

Anchor the floating boat,
But the boat’s not a tale.
It’s cargo to unload.

Four Things about Humans

Copying empowers.
Cooperation devours.
Desire betrays. Friendship saves.

Soringdale

To see that someone like you
Could turn out to be someone
Something like what you wanted
To become feels good. One problem

Now is you’ll get defensive
About those other aspects
You can’t endorse and don’t share
With someone who was like you.

Peripheral Nutrition

What little is there left of you?
The question suggests some dwindling,
Which wouldn’t be exactly true.

Transformation isn’t dwindling.
It’s from your perspective you ask—
How much of your own behavior

Will be involved in the changing,
Will vanish in transformation?
How much of you is left for you?

Do you need to know? Could you know?
Would an answer benefit you?
If you can’t keep anything down,

Is there worth left in worrying
If peripheral nutrition
Is reshaping who you’ve become?

Dreaming of Doors

You close your eyes, still talking,
Except that you’re not talking,
And you open on a room

Now empty of anyone.
You drift back into chit-chat,
And the room fills up again.

Open. And there’s no one there.
Domains of conversation
Intermingle and wobble.

You’re typing, doing something
With your hands, then you startle
To see your fingers are still.

You’re no individual
Dream of drifting off to sleep.
You're half dreams dreaming of doors.

Seven Nights Ago Now

You vowed not to allow
A fresh midnight setback.
You clung to the bed sheets.

You clung to your own skin.
You vowed, you swore, you cursed
As the anonymous

Bolus of pain drilled in.
No idea why that spot.
No idea why so bad,

So suddenly, when all
Had been going so well,
Just one needle gleaming

In the mind as it was
Rolling—don’t give up, don’t
Give in, don’t tell, don’t tell.

More Salsa, Papa

Lines, pushes, drips,
And sub-cue sticks,

Drugs are dreaming
With words missing,

The best being
A restaurant

In bright white sun
Where the child’s made

A meal to share
When you get out.

A Morning Dilemma

Do you relax your head
So you comfortably face
The ugly, dusty corner

Of windowless walls,
Or do you do you turn,
Painfully, carefully,

To peer through some window
At chiffon grey skies, spring
Mountains and blossoms?

You try the latter. You quit.
You stare at the dust. You quit.
You wish you could move.

The Orders

Language shifts to calibrate—
Where the orders are given,
Where the orders are put in,

Where the orders are taken
Where the orders are obeyed
Where the orders are shouted,

Where they come down from on high—
These are all normal orders
For the organization,

Its orderly type revealed
Through its orderly language—
In a hospital, orders

Are put in to be followed,
In a restaurant taken
To be brought out, in a church

Taken to put in for life,
At a window for pick up.
Do not mix your genres up.

Eco Gothical

After a certain amount
Of time, all man-made objects
Transform into habitats.

How much time? Well, that varies,
Not only with the local
Climate and environment,

But with people’s opinions
On what’s attractive enough
To seem reclaimed by the world,

Whether corals or forests
Or overgrown brown spaces.
When it haunts you, it’s enough.

The old, gothic romantics
Liked the cultural signals
In the twilit silhouettes

Of disused and abandoned
Ruined medieval castles.
Now it’s more the vines and owls,

The nearly extinct species
Of lichen, mushrooms, and wolves
That matter--not the stones, but

The overgrowth finding homes
In neglected crevices
Of rebar, slag heaps, old docks.

That’s the newly romantic
Nature of recolonized
Post-industrial ruins.

Fifty-to-One Against Five-Year Survival

Everyone hates the bad news.
Everyone curses the odds.
But here you are in Dive’s Dive,

Place you’ve visited for years,
For decades, written about,
Still steady, unaccusing,

Although your friends are getting
Restive, not liking the game,
Whispering it might be rigged.

You know nothing runs the dive.
Let’s look at another five.
The bad thing about this hand

Is that, if it takes you out,
It takes you completely out,
No more bargaining for more.

One good thing’s that it matters.
Another is you can’t whine
Once you’re done. And why would you?

Once you’re finally nothing,
You’re part owner of the dive.
Alright, can you play this five?

Agnomish

Almost too tortured
To get anything
Done, definitely

Too sick and too drugged
To get anything
Done well, lacking all

Concentration, quick
To shut lids and doze,
To wake with a start—

When they ask you how
Much pain you are in,
You want to say none

But oceans, oceans,
More than you can swim.

Twisty

Bleak plot points spin you around
Widdershins, sparing no pains
To confuse you. Here you’re good,

And here you’re back in trouble!
You’re recovering, but now
You have a fresh, hot fever.

All night, the human, helpful,
Decades of experience,
Field, death, and lab-trained demons,

Hover to assist you. Breathe
Like this, clutch the sheets like this,
Here comes another plot twist.

Never to Be Unhappened or Even Uncertain to Have Happened Again

After the end of the rain
Against the viewless window,
Sunlight in the room again,

One considers when the rain
Began, how it went from clouds
Of probability, vague

Prospects of the Bayesian,
To, now, an accomplished fact,
Forever what happened then.

Shush

The whispers try
To shush themselves,
But whispers lie—

Flat on your back
On a gurney,
Busy dying,

You can’t trust them
Too much. You tell
Distant daughter,

Only daughter,
Of such whispers.
Her note wishes

Them such whispers
Back,and then adds
Extra whispers

About that? See?
Careful quoting,
Careful. We match.

Too Much at Once

A body pretty
Generally knows
When there is pleasure
And when there is pain,

But things can get strange
When extremes of both
Arrive together—
Except for those souls

Who specialize.
The rest of the time,
A hospital bath’s
A shock and a half.

Not That You Ever Quite Did

On an afternoon when you were never
Not among objects and drugs, you never

Could seem to get things quite to when never
Was that flawless afternoon never,

Back when falling in love with a never,
Gave life its life dependent on never.

Uzzier

You get kind comments
You have to say

So kind you would presume
You would have to kick them

All too quickly away

You dream the daffiest phrases
In your hallucinatory naps

That never ride out the hour—
It used to be treasonably fantastic—

And then someone knocks at your door

Another medicine needle
Another set of questions

And fluttery or firm suggestions
We need to do this to get you well

Another buzzer buzzier bell

Breathe Out

Whether it’s good news or . . .

different news,

A doctor said, and you thought about that,

Different news. Easy euphemism,

But a heavy lift for difference here

Implying something more than opposite,

The doctor just didn’t want to say bad,

Since death would be the certain suggestion

In your situation. Death is never

Simple enough to be certain,

Just certain enough to be devious,

To have all the time in the world for tricks,

 

Which is why any news involving death

Always makes you want to hold your breath.

A Little Buzzing

Life is good when it feels good,
However abstemious,
However bacchanalian.

If all life always felt good,
You wouldn’t miss suffering,
You wouldn’t worry the costs

Of feeling good were bad
Feelings later, nor blame good
(Indulging in feeling good)

For giving you bad later.
True, good will lead on to bad,
While bad will lead on to good.

Sun in the sickroom window—
What makes you feel good is good.

Day Rose

A few mornings ago,
Light in the window, pulse
In the chest, old music

On a laptop, rucked sheets
Pulled up around the rest.
Were you a body?

You were. Anything more?
The metaphysicians
And scientists confer.

While you wait, are you now
Embodied, any pulse
At all? Well, must be so,

If you’re encountering
These phrases. Memory,
Though, is so slippery.

All those mornings you drove
Up mesas in starlit
Predawn dark, past mule deer

And jackrabbits, to watch
The day begin, glowing
In your brain. Was that you?

God, the air was so clear,
And the River of Souls
So bright. And the day rose.

Clubbable

Every condition has a club.
Most you don’t know til you’re in them.
Bumming around the world’s a club

You join in remote locations.
Unlikely cancers form a club
And unlikely lives lived with them.

The Ivy League dropout who lands
In some remote, provincial town
May be startled to discover

Three more Ivy League dropouts there
Who, of course, all know each other.
It’s not always comfortable.

As someone with two doctorates
You could end up with a colleague
With two who embarrasses you.

As someone with a freak disease
You could find others with the same
Who are convinced God can explain.

But you’re in there. You’re in the club,
However rare, and there’s always
More in there with you than you knew.

Voices from a Windy Cliff

It was slightly comical,
Slightly insane, the manner
In which, before surgery,

The surgeon and patient sat
Chatting about possible
Outcomes, probabilities,

In clear, lighthearted voices,
Friendly new acquaintances
Who could have been discussing

The weather as easily.
“If the nodes test negative,
That’ll be great, what we want.

Of course we’ll still do chemo.
If they come back positive,
The chemo just buys some time,

But probably not a lot.”
Imagine driving a cliff
Road rapidly eroding,

While chatting casually
About driving strategy
And when to know you’re over

The edge, how the wheels will feel
Once spinning in empty air.
The cliff would crumble quicker,

Of course, than would the body
With the cancer. Then again,
Weather can be a killer,

Part of why folks talk so much
About storms and their forces,
And what every omen means,

Since every conversation
About how things will turn out
Turns on slower or faster.