Out Mode

After another sapping
Work week at the orifice,

Plugged through the wall, miracle
Of substitute cubicle,

Miracle of replacement
Window for any classroom,

The old year comes to an end
In form of final memos

Composed by language-learning
Sapiens as reminders

To all remaining readers
That any references

To the latest smart tools risk
Being dated yesterday.

But It Isn’t, So It Is Still

Almost a quarter-century

Since the exact date of the First

Was predictably ominous.

It’s rare, outside of cults, you get

A date for the apocalypse.

Mostly it’s all, any time now!

Could start as soon as tomorrow—

The end—as soon as tomorrow—

Never right now, it’s here, for sure.

What an absurd coincidence

If the end of this calendar

Year, in this given calendar,

Hegemonic, but one among

Many, many such calendars,

Happened to usher in the end.

Party over, oops, out of time!

And the calendar formerly

Known as Western, Gregorian,

Stopped along with everything else.

That’s the problem with meaningful.

If it is, it isn’t, itself.

The Warfighters

For a minute, never mind

The soldiers themselves. The real

Experiences of war

Are shared throughout the war zone—

The student, the refugee,

The pacifist, the doctor,

The housewife, the journalist,

The office worker, the priest—

They have all been in the war

And will carry it with them

Down to their last memories,

Which they will fight with their lives.

Remembrance is something else,

War for the absence of war.

A Brief Flash of Light

Light, sand, snow. Dreams of the blank.
Reams of unlined bleached paper.
Pale sky neither cloud nor clear.

What can we do for you here?
Pick up a sheaf of attempts.
This one’s something about love.

You like love, don’t you? This one
Concerns a white paper box.
A little too on the nose.

A paper on stars eating
Their own planets at the end,
Molecules washed out in light. . .

Here’s one on strange happiness.
What’s strange is that it stays strange.

What Is You Aren’t

Pain creates a boundary
Between body and the world.
It’s the body clamoring

For all of the attention
Awareness might normally
Parcel out to other things—

Concern over news events,
Pleasure in the fine weather,
Contemplation of the light—

Pain wants all of you, enfolds
Your thoughts, holds them to itself,
Lets you know whatever’s you

Isn’t the soft day beyond,
Isn’t the sunlight and calm.

The Vaccinated Escape

Wish to wish for something different,
Aspire to a different intent—
Better yet, wish to never wish.

Here is a cabin in the snow,
Impervious to winter storms,
Full-shelved pantry and library.

Its real magic isn’t the fact
That it’s perfectly built and stocked
With supplies for body and mind.

Its real magic is that it is
Completely inoculated
Against every cabin fever.

Hide out all winter, you won’t wish
For anything but to be there.

The Late

Somebody didn’t update

The biographical note

Terribly well—he will serve

In that position until

His death the following spring.

Mortality, that matter

Of tense. Whoever did it

Will continue to do it

Until they were finally

Relieved of that position.

Maybe they were a prophet,

However, maybe never

Committed to any tense,

Maybe served who will not wait.

But Then Again Who Doesn’t?

If you’ve ever introduced
Yourself to someone else, you’ve
Lived as person animal,

Maybe sometimes regretting
The person part or the part
That stays fully animal,

Maybe sometimes full of doubt
About your true personhood
Or your animal nature.

Nonetheless a portmanteau,
Half-empty or overstuffed,
Being double, you’ve wondered

At the worth of how you’ve lived,
And if you’ve really lived it. . .

Immortal Drag

You are therefore. You are thus.
Consequently, you are then
Ergo, and accordingly

You are for this reason. So.
Igitur, you are. What is
To be done, if anything

About this? Tunc, nunc, nothing
Much. Let someone else decide
When it is, therefore, you aren’t.

When the gods translate Hamlet,
The play is always put on
In immortal modern dress,

But the soliloquy seems
To be so poorly expressed.

A Moving Story

You won’t have to dry your eyes.
A U-Haul is not involved.
The story will move itself.

It can. It’s autofiction.
It has its own set of wheels.
It’s pretty hard to follow,

Racing to its conclusion,
The point at which it breaks down
In the middle of the road.

Spooky Polypi at a Distance

Aside from malacologists

And logomaniacs, few folks

Know what malacologists know.

Oddly, given that hard k sound,

Malakos signified tender,

Soft, and gentle in Ancient Greek,

Rare exception, apparently,

To the bouba/kiki effect.

Anyway, squishy fish studies,

These days somewhat popularized

By lore of smart cephalopods.

The study of anything’s cool

If the subject borders magic—

Wormholes, entangled quantum states,

AI, octopus wizardry.

It’s not that people want to know

More intimately what’s under

Scrutiny so much as the thrill

Of any hints there are other

Timelines, other-minded agents,

Entwined weirdness in the framework

Of a householder’s universe.

It tends to end in puzzlement.

Which parts held that hint of magic—

The monstrous tentacles, the eyes

Of the near-alien agent,

Its behaviors, its spiral whorls?

People always seem to end up

Clutching emptied material.

At the Malacological

Museum, in the Makarska

Franciscan monastery’s shell,

The whole collection is just shells.

Grounds for Leaving

The tendency is to live
Or to think about living

As if what you have, what’s been
Allotted, what you have left,

Are the days in front of you,
Which you use up, which you lose,

And you don’t have that many.
Oops, you burned another day,

You wasted another day,
Time you won’t get back again.

But none of those days exist,
And what’s null is never fixed.

Maybe consider instead
The entirely plausible

Scenario that your days
Are the ones you’ve lived, the ones

You can remember. Those days,
Like the body, do decay,

But only as they pile up.
The past isn’t what you can’t

Have back. Days you had, you have.
Live more, before you forget.

Let them fall like crowns of leaves.
You’re the ground. You’re not the trees.

The Type Specimen

The young Percy Grainger, looking

Like Vladimir Putin bewigged,

Was up to all sorts of odd things,

From fresh folk-music arrangements

To avant-garde experiments

With beatless aleatorics,

From sexual flagellation

In keen sadomasochism

To loud pro-Nordic racism,

And that hardly touches his range.

He would build his own museum,

Rate himself ninth-greatest all time

Of the classical composers

And declare himself a failure.

He left Australia to claim it

As a lifelong expatriate

Patriot, wrote for marching bands

Earnestly as for symphonies

And built elaborate machines

To auto-generate music,

Proclaiming them the true future

Of composition, not humans,

While to this day he is best known

To those aficionados

Of soothing, nostalgic pieces

Who still are fond of his setting

Of the folk dance, Country Gardens.

Now, for your homework this evening,

Articulate human nature

From holotype Percy Grainger.

Infinite Loops of Mutual Obligations Tether Together

Interchain hydrogen bonds
Gain strength and stability
From numbering in millions,

Although individual
Hydrogen bonds are quite weak.
Hence the deep double nature

Of DNA, both stable
And separable, subject
To copying and decay.

Humanity might not be
A superorganism
So much as a latter-day

Echoing of DNA
With gift-giving exchanges
And favors taking the place

Of hydrogen bonds in chains.
Cohesion builds from exchange,
Giving and accepting

Gifts plus time. Kindness to one
Is honored by acceptance
Of the gift and then later

Kindness in return. Again.
And again. The difference
With human bonds, however,

Is that their strength is greatest
When at their most intimate,
Their longest chains the weakest.

Language has tools to change this,
Has metaphors of kinship
Suggesting intimacy

And pairwise relationships
Between individuals
And strangers, armies, the state.

But language isn’t potlatch
Yet, and metaphors aren’t yet
Gifts themselves. Still, time may tell.

Averted

There may be a universe
Somewhere where God is so good,
God’s like a catastrophe

Avoided successfully—
Nothing bad having happened,
God must have not been a threat.

No one needs theodicy,
Since there’s no harm to explain,
And God, having done no harm,

Isn’t perceived to exist,
To have ever existed,
Nor need to exist. Poor God

Of that good universe, left
Forever uninvented.

Never Think They Can’t

It’s pretty awful for you
And worse for many others,
But acknowledgement never

Feels much like consolation.
Moments when your hurts recede
In friendship or kind weathers,

When the body feels pleasant
For a person to be in,
Possibly even well-loved,

Those are the consolations,
And fine food or holy sense
Of wonder their filigree.

The great consolation is
That consolations can be.

Cancer Dancing

Is there any way
In which they may be
Enjoying themselves?

Multicellular
Organisms have
Fun all kinds of ways,

But at the level
Of cells? Of rogue cells?
The way they carry

On jousting, evolving,
Racing each other,
Dodging all the ways

Death comes after them,
The body’s patrols,
The surgeon’s scalpel,

The chemical bombs,
The radiation
Punching holes in them,

Still partying on,
Finding new places
To land and invade,

There must be a kind
Of joy to it all,
The small lives lived large.

To the Inhuman Gods

There’s no mythology,
Not of one or many
Deities, where the gods

Just keep it to themselves—
Where they mind their business,
The wise and the jealous,

The mother and father,
Creator, destroyer,
Even the messengers.

They’re huge, they’re immortal,
Powerful, beautiful—
They’re righteous, they’re rascals,

They’re shapeshifters, shapeless,
And wholly abstracted,
But they don’t interact

On any occasion
With humans or human
Fates. Those gods don’t get myths.

If You Mean to Visit the Misty Marsh Woods

Here, let’s build a small gap in the wall.
It’s alright that it’s an indoor wall.
Nearly everyone lives in cities,

If not in suburbs like frogspawn, now.
Real garden walls are for public parks
Or for the privately frightened rich.

Any interior wall will do,
So long as you don’t punch all the way
Through to neighbors or your other room.

What’s the point of a gap in a wall
If it isn’t even a portal?
Well, that’s exactly the point. Portals

Go all the way through, either to more
Ordinary world, like any door,
Or into nothing, except in tales.

The number of tales about portals
Has grown so great it’s unbearable.
Just create a small gap in the wall.

Kneel or sit and stick your head in it.
Now you are properly in the wilds.
Whatever’s going on in your head

Is as much alternative cosmos
As you get. In such a position,
What wildness can memories project?

How Much Illness Counts as an Emergency?

You can go. You can come back.
You could try to carry on
Another night, one more night,

And then in the morning, if
You’re still home in the morning,
You can face the same choices,

The same questions—how badly
Do you hurt, are you impaired,
Do you think the pain will grow,

If you don’t get help? No one
Wants to play the pincushion
In a windowless white room

While tests are ordered, taken,
Considered and debated.
If lucky you’d get released

With a clear and unscary
New diagnosis, sent home,
Possibly with painkillers.

If unlucky you must stay,
Admitted and maybe wheeled
Into hours of surgery

From which you may never or
Never fully recover.
You need to make up your mind,

Even though you’re pretty sure
Biochemicals, weather,
Discomfort, ephemera,

Possibly even your genes
Or your resident microbes
Are deciding this for you.

You can go. You can come back.
You could try to carry on
Another night, one more night.

What Will Do Is as What Does

Looks like my brain has decided I should
Do this now, thinks the neuroscientist.

Looks like the Devil’s trying to get me
To do this now, thinks the pious deacon.

Looks like my search engine has determined
I’m looking for these now, thinks the browser.

Looks like the world’s forgotten to consult
Poets now, thinks the terminal hermit.

Clinamen, the Neutrino Event

While you’re struggling with your people’s struggles,
Or with the struggles of other people,
Or with your personal, universal
Struggles in coming to terms with your life,

Spare an odd thought for things like neutrinos
That are now, this instant, passing through you,
Already through, you never noticing,
Sailing through the open and uncurtained

Window that your flesh is to neutrinos,
Window wide open to a fine spring day
That is you and your sorrows and struggles
To those marvelously light neutrinos,

That may, once in a very rare while, strike
A proton chiming faintly in your thoughts.

Reading Poems to Stall the Hospital

The world works, a poem

Of Sandra Simonds

Insisted, Even

From here. . . . The world works

Wonders, it added,

Then walked back. The world

Works / but not today.

Not for me. Functions,

Maybe, the world does.

Works-for-me implies

Something good enough.

Works wonders suggests

The miraculous.

Not today argues

For an exception.

In a sunny chair

In desert winter,

Aware of failure

Of the internal

Functions of organs

That might as well be

The world, given they

Can’t be abandoned,

Parts of the world work.

The propane heater,

The fridge compressor—

Those things work wonders,

Make a mockery

Of entropy, dance

In defiance, but

An emergency

Room looms, merciful

Nightmare. How world works.

Insidiously Somehow Contriving by Some Way or Other to Represent to the Imagination

If reality really is one
Consensual hallucination,
The consensus is that there must be

More to reality than is seen.
The conviction that there must be rules
Beyond the patterns humans measure

Is as human as taking measures.
How many passages of fiction
Gasp beached by their imaginations,

Struggling to say how something was weird
Beyond words, beyond experience,
Reduced to begging readers to bear

Responsibility for raising
To mind the unimaginable
Glories and horrors they’re suggesting?

When someone gestures to worlds beyond
The known, they’re trying to turn your head
From all your felt details to the blank.

You’ll Never Take the Wrong Path through the Stars

Night’s only not so scary
Now since, unlike the forests,
The oceans, and the mountains

That used to scare you, you can’t
Actually wander off or
Set sail and get lost out there.

Sure, you send small robots out,
Take a few steps on the moon,
Cogitate missions to Mars,

But you’re not really going
Anywhere, not deep into
The night, the great starry night.

You can stare at it blankly,
But you can’t get lost in it.
Inaccessibility

Makes it less mysterious,
Less like the unknown you fear,
More like background lights at home.

The Dragon’s Mouth

Look at the ice. It should be
Thicker. Will it get thicker?
If it does, then you won’t be

Able to come look at it.
You’ll be stuck somewhere lower
Thinking about the high ice,

Thick as it should be by then.
But for now it only shrouds
Half the bay. The long shadows

Mean it will get thicker soon,
But only for overnight.
Past dawn it will thin again.

Look at the ice. It’s normal
It’s ice, but not that it’s thin.
Get lost, before it thickens.

It’s the Comeback of the Outside Will End You

There’ll be no last wildness,
Unless you’re referring
To the idea of wild.

There’ll be a last idea
And a last use for each
Word naming an idea.

What wildness designates
As an idea will go
On and on, past even

Domestication’s end.
There was no contrast back
When everything was wild,

And no beasts specified
Tame or wild distinctions.
Wild is the default mode

Of life on this planet
And domestication
Recent. You were afraid

Of what you weren’t, and then
You mourned its loss. You should
Still be afraid, a bit.

How’s It Going Here?

Forty-six years and one half
Of a light-hour away now,
Voyager’s been stuttering

Repetitive loops of code
Its team is hoping to fix.
Meanwhile, the prospects for life

On the moon Enceladus
Keep getting more promising—
All the key ingredients.

Two years ago this Christmas
Earth launched the Webb telescope.
It’s been doing very well—

More galaxies discovered,
More planets identified,
More oddities, more questions.

Sometimes, it’s like there’s two plots
To this postmodern novel—
The one in which a species

And its machinery take
Unsteady steps into space,
As if they are growing up

And becoming more aware,
And the other in which, well,
You know how it’s going here.

The Nervous System

They all are. It always is.
People live hiding in it.
People are the system’s nerves.

If a system ran itself
Without people secreted
In the arras, in the walls,

Over ceilings, under floors,
That system would be tranquil,
Unperturbed, a circumstance

People inside and outside
Of the system fear alike.
People keep things jittery.

The ones inside the system,
The ones close to the controls,
Know how the outsiders rage.

They quiver in their tunnels
And make the system nervous.
Parasites are nervous, too,

Knowing they might be exposed,
Sneaky buggers, devouring
The system’s guarded stockpiles—

Like pheromonally masked
Larvae consuming ant eggs
Under the ants’ antennae—

Shredded into little bits
The ants throw out in the cold.
And those the system rests on,

The way organisms sway
Upon the good graces of
Hordes of apoptotic cells,

Are nervous that the system
Grows by sacrificing them,
And they should be, since it does.

Discrepancy Exceptionalism

Contradictions make the species
Feel ever so special. Two hands
Raised and waving around about

Every delicious paradox
In every complex character—
On the one hand, on the other!

So subtle! So mysterious!
The nuances of character,
The contradictory stances,

The hypocrisies of leaders,
The secret lecheries of saints,
The racist conservationists,

The benevolent dictators,
On and on, the grey areas,
The self-destructive ethicists.

You’re only contradictory
As far as your language says so,
As far as your customs insist.

That a killer would show kindness
Or an aid-worker commit rape,
Hardly count as paradoxes

Given all sorts of animal
Behaviors switch within a beast.
Oh, but you’re special, you’re unique.

Powerful

The best of all possible
Evenings at home in those days,
The Christmas Eves of childhood.

You’re not nostalgic. You don’t
Want to go back to the tree
Decorating, the darkness

Outside, the precarious
Wishes of being a child.
That’s just the way that it was.

Those lights would be up next night
And several nights after that.
The dark outside wasn’t done,

The cold just getting started,
But the anticipation,
Later, would be exhausted.

Just one night had the power
To conjure the possible
As if it were magical,

Even knowing how it worked,
How parents made it happen.
One night, red glow, fresh tinsel.

Thousands of Teams Are You Deciphering This

Fifty-three hundred types
Of cells in a mouse brain—
Not cells, mind you, cell types.

Work is now ongoing
To catalog human
Types of brain cells as well—

Thirty-three hundred and
Barely getting started.
The specialization

Of multicellular
Organisms staggers
Multi-organism

(Plus multi-machine) teams.
How many layers of
Specialists will there be

Before the planet tires
Of assembling such teams?
And still, bacteria,

Bacteriophages,
Maybe phage parasites,
Carry on anarchies

That rule from the bottom.
What’s gained by unity
But opportunity

To become cells of the next
Level up, undermined
By every level down?

First We Are Flowers

First, they were leaves. They evolved
For reproductive functions.
They were never stems or trees,

Never whole organisms.
Still, in their ephemeral
Blossoming, you saw yourselves,

Saw metaphors for your own
Seasons of grace and decay.
You identified with them,

These body parts of some plants,
Extravagant, glorious,
Suddenly here, suddenly

Gone. Above all, suddenly
Gone, shrugged off from stems and trees.

Craving a Brute to Shelter You

Having somehow escaped
A tyrannically
Abusive parent who
Loudly claimed to love you
While threatening savage
Punishments, would you

Immediately search
For a replacement for
Your loss? Maybe you would.
It’s striking how many
Poets, philosophers,
Manifesto writers

Offer their arts in lieu
Of a lost faith in God.
Why try to make scriptures
Out of secular arts?
If it’s scripture you seek,
Plenty gets created

On the regular by
Charlatans and would-be
Prophets with as many
Assertive answers as
Faith could possibly need.
They’re lying everywhere.

But maybe a black hole
Would grow more terrible,
Even, in its absence.
It just stands to reason
There’s something comforting
About a great tyrant

And something frightening
About the lack of one.
Part of you dreams that God,
That terrifying God,
Must be great, must be good
As your God, on your side.

Two Glazed Donuts under a Mackerel Sky

A poor breakfast and a book review

Of the collected works of someone

Or other you knew of but never

Particularly cared for, never

Got, as the well-worn idiom goes.

The reviewer’s moderately kind

And only a little bit snarky.

The review affirms the poet’s dread

Of a lack of response from the world.

You glance at the soft and papery

Crush of the clouds. Don’t live for response

From people but the lack from the world.

Something Beyond This World

The yolk floats in the egg,
The whole inside the shell.
It takes a fine needle
To pierce the shell and white

And stab into the yolk
Without cracking the shell,
Without spilling the world.
The yolk puckers inward.

The needle delivers
Dye, medicine, new genes,
One first cell of new life,
Something along those lines.

Think of all the people
Who profess to pollsters
That they’ve experienced
Something beyond this world.

The Long Afterthought

Any decades lived past adolescence
Amount to Frost’s long afterthought, although
It’s got nothing to do with leadership,
As young Frost, valedictorian, thought.

Of course, Frost the valedictorian
Had yet to live any long afterthought,
Which doesn’t necessarily include
Regret, either. It’s just in its nature,

As long afterthought, to reconsider.
Many readers have reconsidered Frost,
The ratio of cornpone to dark rum,
How much of the rum was made molasses,

And whose actual down-home sufferings
Underwrote consumable afterthoughts.

Not What You Thought

You’re becoming a modest connoisseur
Of every day’s unexpected events,
Charming, destructive, merely unforeseen.

If you don’t just absorb them but notice—
Someone else changing plans, a stop for lunch,
A fraudulent charge on a credit card—

Little twists that reshape the arcs of days
But that tend to get absorbed, folded back—
Plans only delayed, new card in the mail,

A memory of a lunch half-recalled
Maybe once during small talk, years later
If ever—ordinary days fill up

With these turns, not just the ones that raise storms
With their butterfly wings, the boring ones
And the annoying ones soon forgotten.

But as you fall asleep, whatever end
Your waking hours reach, now you think how much
Of each next day’s unimaginable.

Checkout Counter

One of the older holiday recordings

Piping from a small-town grocery ceiling,

For nostalgia, the spirit of the season,

Not for mental arithmetic re lifespan.

Three-point-five billion people in the world then?

Three billion of those now dead, half a billion

Octogenarians up, seven-point-five

Living now born since and a couple billion

Born and died since? Nine or ten billion babies

Of this species in eight decades, give or take,

One of them ringing all this up in its head.

What the Well-Regarded Said

A small person reads an old-fashioned

Printed paper magazine in which
August, well-regarded names follow
Passages of some profundity
And wit about being and aging.

The small person sets the magazine

Down on a battered side table next
To a futon made up as a bed
And thinks on what the well-regarded
Names are credited as having said.

The laundry machine cycles to spin.

Words above one well-regarded name
Refer to visiting someone’s grave.
Words above the other refer
To reading well-regarded writers

As if they were hard to understand.

Don’t Know

What does the prey actually feel
As the pack hunters circle it?
Nothing other than rising fear
And the surge of adrenaline?

Does the nonhuman have a sense
Of more than fearfulness, of doom?
And what is the feeling of doom
Exactly, even for humans?

Probably no more than terror
Triggered like any other fear,
Symphonic hormonal response
To a looming threat, uncertain

Of the end, although certainty,
In the human case, is the threat.
It’s quiet behind the windows.
The day closes in on sunset.

Float Ahead

Not out of nothing
Into nothing much
But into nothing

Out of nothing much—
Creation’s into,
Always, never out,

Tied to the bowsprit,
Nevermind the mast,
Pummeled by foaming

Wine-dark waves and wind,
Not at all tempted
By tendrils of song.

It’s water-boarding
And battering more
Than riding some shell

Modestly attired
In nothing but self.
If you get across

Some patch of ocean
To scratch up ashore,
You’re fit to sail more.

Not That They Do Much About It

You sense from how the house pets sniff you,

They’re registering how ill you are.

The bodies are in conversation,

One wafting, guess what I’m hiding here,

The other responding, smells like death.

Funny how you could never sniff out

Hidden malignancy in a pet.

You need visuals and behavior

Changes, which you’re still slow to notice.

For all of the vaunted vibrissae

Of artists attuned to the Zeitgeist,

Tales, poems, and paintings are slow as well,

One of the more ignoble reasons

Artists often end up scurrying

Too late and are snatched up by the state.

If you could put your nose to the ground

Or go down the rabbit holes of screens

Without getting lost in labyrinths,

If you could track straight through and pinpoint

The malignancy, breathing deeply . . .

Then again, you might be just a pet.

One Past’s Present Absence

Train tracks cut through the grey
Winter woods, rough scrub brush,
Really, what grew itself

Back around the steel tracks.
A woman walked the ties,
Looking for any clues

Of her missing grown son,
A picture in the news,
Frozen in the moment

Of its particular
Circumstances, that place,
The there-ness of the tracks,

The thin scraps of new snow,
The tangled, bare branches,
The scattered piles of wood,

The woman’s round shoulders
In her dark anorak,
Black pant legs in gum boots,

No animals or birds
Anywhere in the view,
No sign of her lost son.

Slowly Dawning

Staring at a humming
Steel refrigerator,
Human-produced machine,

Like it might say something,
A familiar warning
Worms its way through the brain—

The world is not people.
It’s so self-evident,
Why’s it so hard to grasp

And keep always in mind?
The stars are not people,
Waiting to talk to you.

The rock wren on the stones
Outside winter’s window
Is a bird, not people,

Not bringing a message
To you from the bird tribe.
The floor is not people,

Although people built it
And the roof, and the walls.
They’re not there to explain

Themselves or to gossip
About the furnishings.
The trees are not people,

Leafless or evergreen.
The weather’s not people,
However influenced

By what people may do.
You know this, through and through.
Still, you sit and you wait,

Unintentionally
Expectantly for things
To say something to you.

Day’s Birth

The day did what days do—
Not this day, but that one.
They start and they go on,

And at some point they turn
In a way you could not
Have seen based on the past,

But they can still be dull,
And of course they can be
Done, the dull days, the turns,

The hours that seemed to be
Terse as stones in the weeds,
Like this day’s and that one’s.

You want them to add up,
Not what they add up to.

The Shadow in All Social Scenes

What’s will is irrelevant—
Free, costly, or nonexistent.
All you really care about

Is whether you can do what
You want to do and whether
You can blame other people

For doing as they wanted.
A vote for will’s a yes vote—
Yes, you can; yes, you can blame—

Which feels good, significant,
Except when you’re being blamed.
You wouldn’t care about will,

Poor will, if it weren’t that will
Had implications for blame,
And you should care about blame,

Since it’s dangerous, a blade
In your own hands or others’,
And when the will is invoked

Or denied you can be sure
The question of blame’s engaged,
And at least one soul’s at risk.

The other, happier side
Of will—the dream you can will
What you want, achieve your dream—

Is a little less toothy.
Oh, look what a strong-willed life
You’ve led! Look what you can do!

Careful, however. You know
The shadow of intention
Deepens culpability.

Fly in Amber

Life is a kind of madness

That death makes, wrote Lispector,

After writing that she wrote

To save her life, but before

Of course she died, a bit shy

Of fifty-seven, to then

Say nothing further on death,

Life, or madness she hadn’t

Already said while alive.

Good Question

He quirked an eyebrow.
How miserable
Can life get for you
Before it’s over,
Lets you get to death?

You’re obviously
Going for the full
Trifecta: illness,
Obscurity, debt.
Those drag on a bit.

It’s a long way down
That slope, lots of stones,
Stumps, and broken bones
Before the bottom
Or you stop rolling.

You had your chances
Earlier, exits
By self-destruction,
Sudden accidents,
But you were lucky,

No freeway pile-ups,
No active shooters,
No carpet bombings,
No mere homicides.
Now, how long’s the slide?

In the Nature of Artifice

Every problem with the rules
Remains a problem of rules.
The cost-benefit tradeoffs of rules

Involve vaguely prosocial
Cooperative leanings
Becoming more efficient

And well-coordinated
At the cost of many acts
Of spontaneous kindness.

Cooperation becomes
Cooperating with rules,
Which safeguards against the mess

Of embodied emotions,
Manipulable feelings,
And fuzzy-edged biases.

Rules grow exoskeletal,
Chitinous suits of armor
From extended phenotypes

That can sometimes entangle
And suffocate the social
Imperatives they harness,

But that’s the nature of rules.
Every problem with the rules
Lies in that nature of rules.

Not Waiting for Anyone

Someone who wasn’t
Remembered a year
After dying young

In a small village,
A nomadic band,
Or a chattel slum,

More than one someone,
Left behind a corpse
That wasn’t consumed,

Wasn’t cremated—
Accidentally
Endured in the ground.

They’re out there. They’re still
Out there, like Ötzi,
Like the Ice Maiden,

Like the Bog People,
Like the Plague victims,
Only quieter

Even, even less
Noteworthy, still real,
The real accidents

Of preservation
Left of dying lives
No one will dig up,

No one stumble on,
The ones you won’t find
Whose faith doesn’t count,

Whose national myth
No longer exists,
Of little interest

Even to science,
Rare but too standard,
Uninformative,

Too damaged, some bones
Some soil simply holds
Of beings who spoke.

And Colonization Is an Awesome, Awesome Thing

To proselytize effectively,

A creed needs to tie emotional rewards

To successful missionarizing.

If adherents become teary-eyed

With a joyous, cathartic relief

At the thought of opening their minds,

At the thought of hearts being opened,

Then that faith has got a fighting chance

To colonize replacement mortals.

Muck under the Text

They’re not good enough.
They don’t say enough,
The novels, the poems,
The talkative plays,
The science essays.

Some are exciting,
Some vivid, some rich
With gossip, fictive
Or factual, some
Fiercely predictive,

Some historical,
Some scriptural, but
They don’t say enough.
There’s something missing,
So you keep reading.

You’re dragging your thoughts
Through the texts, feeling
For something you hope
You’ll brush lightly first,
Before it cuts you

Open, like the tool
You grasped and fumbled
That fell in the words,
The all-purpose edge
Lost under the text.

Out the Door

The knife didn’t get them all.
Neither have the chemicals.
The radiation is next.

This is banal. This is just
What happens, and, in a way,
Is a kind of a mercy

In not being all human
And only human, one more
Humans-hurting-humans thing.

These living cells, no longer
Functioning for the system,
Just race each other to eat

More, reproduce more, live more,
Eat ‘em up, yum, live like life
Always lived, from the get-go.

They may have once been human,
Owe their lives to behaviors
Uniquely human, struggle

Now to escape the human
Interventions (surgeries,
Chemicals, radiations),

But they’re not human beings,
Not even cells of one soul
Anymore. They’re past that door.

No Kind of Writer

You wouldn’t want to write
Anything false to life,
Which has to mean your life,

And so the best writers
Convey their vivid lives,
Their lived lives, their own lives,

Even in full fictions,
Fables and fantasies,
And yet, all that saves them

From mere irrelevance
Is that many readers
And audience members

Identify with them.
So write true to life.
Don’t be a false coward,

But also don’t forget
All the truth of your life
Only counts if others

Find it speaks to the truths
Of their own lives. If not,
You’re no kind of writer.

Can’t Leave Until You’re Gone

You were just kids pretending
To be real theater kids.
You encouraged each other
To audition together.
You lacked actual talent
But sometimes you landed parts.
You liked the theater dark.

You liked sneaking in off-hours,
Ostensibly to rehearse.
You liked the lack of windows,
The spooky glow on the stage.
You liked to tell each other
It was the theater’s ghost.
You made up stories for it—

A hidden, unwanted child
Raised alone under the stage
Who came out to sing at night
When no shows were in progress.
The child had learned all the shows,
All the parts, the lines, the songs.
In your stories, it was shot

By a security cop
Or frightened stage manager
Who caught it singing alone
By the ghost light, refusing
To stop. Now, you decided,
It was still there to haunt you,
The way you haunted yourselves

By hiding and whispering,
Floating tremolo voices
From dark corners to startle
Each other into small yelps.
And then you left. You gave up,
Grew up, went into your worlds,
Imprisoned ghosts in your skulls.

Lie Objects

A lie is only anything
That only exists as its names

A myth is only anything
A fiction only anything

A god is only anything
The same the same the same the same

Before going too far this way
Try to recall how many names

Began as actual labels
And then how many stayed that way

A minority admit it
So many more lost referents

Had their referents stripped by death
Or shuffled away for new ones

The whole unstable edifice
Of a mostly pointless deixis

So that most names only make sense
As only their own existence

Why Your Future Golf

Balls won’t roll as far as they do now.
Following a long list of items
About AI and global warming,

Corporate leaders estimating,
Prognosticating, and quarreling
Over profits and the odds of doom,

There’s this—that in the future, golf balls
Won’t roll as far, thanks to new designs.
The future’s a ludicrous monster.

Monitor Your Self Talk

Watch for negativity
And doom-loop ruminations.
Change the topic. Steer away.

Think of something positive.
Remember, monitoring
Is what humans excel at.

Excel at monitoring
Yourself. Keep a watchful eye
On the small-talk floating by

So you can improve yourself,
Starting with your own insides.
It will improve your outside.

See how the species improves?
Monitoring must work well.

Being in Compliance

Tick those boxes.
Tick like a clock,
Grandfatherly,
A patient clock.

You’re not giving
In, you’re filling
Out the edges,
Filling the time,

Completing time,
Completely time,
All of its forms,
All of its lines.

No blanks, no failed
Assessments, no
Noncompliance,
Nothing but time.

What Do You Have to Do?

What do you have to go on about?
What do you have, what do you have to
Go on about what happened to you?

What do you have to work with? What, what
Do you have that you have to work with,
What’s in your past that you have to work?

What do you absolutely have to
Claim as your own as something you have
To go on to work with what you have?

The Humans in the Machine

Dig into the muck
Of any system
Or institution,
Get to the bottom,
And find the humans,

Who aren’t in control
So much as in fear
Of losing control,
Losing their grip, their
Privileges, their

Sinecures. Someone
Lurks in the belly
Of every faceless
Appearing machine,
Wanting human things

Like security
And indulgences,
And the fantasy
Of feeling in charge
Of all of these things.

There’s no system yet,
No institution,
That isn’t haunted
By humans hungry
To control humans.

Chorish

Nothing that’s done can be undone,
But nothing done ever stays done,
Always has to be done again.

So is the past doing itself
Or undoing itself to do
Itself done all over again?

The Earth spins as it has to spin,
Has spun, never undone, again.

Grapes, Sour or Fermented

Of course, everyone longs for the fun
Aspects of success, and of course, none
Covet the damage. Lacking success

Has the advantage of fantasy
And the disadvantage that hunger
Can’t be satiated daydreaming.

Having success? Ask those who would know,
But it seems like any addiction.
Hunger leaves, briefly. Returns. Hurt stays.

Useless Thought Experiment

It would make for an interesting prison,
If life traded reproduction for living
Among immortality obsessed humans.

Start off with eight to ten billion as givens,
Sterilize them but stop nature killing them,
And when they kill each other, resurrect them.

It would take quite a while, but it would sink in.
They are who they’ve got, and no replacing them.
Ten billion’s a big enough number, you’d think,

Now with plenty of years for reinvention,
And no point to fear anyone’s extinction,
And age differences hardly worth mentioning.

This presents imagination the question,
Would they go insane or be contented then?

The Problem with Engineering Is Always with the Engineers

Why has kindness persisted
And yet never succeeded
In superseding anger?

We all know how the quick flash
That flushes the skin, tightens
The grip, desires to lash out.

The body’s spontaneous
Gushes—fear, anger, kindness,
Disgust—none programs others

Out of us. Circumstances
External to the body
Can alter more easily,

And in turn, act to alter
How much kindness, how much hate.
Drugs can have short-term effects.

Religions amplify both.
We’ll try engineering next,
But we’ll engineer anger

For our teams, maybe poison
Our enemies with cocktails
That force them to be kinder,

Before we’re likely to let
Ourselves be reengineered
So kindness succeeds in us.

Circuitus

Ask any world-building
Fantasy novelist,
It’s awfully hard work

To create like a god
With only memory
And cultural downloads

For raw materials.
Real gods get the cheat code
Of an actual void.

Any twitch at all breathes
Something into nothing.
But still the brave writers

Writing from and for life
On higher and higher
Stacks of each other’s worlds

Suffer to create more
For the world-hungry hordes
Wanting fresh exit doors.

Keeping the Faith

How has this phrase

Never become

Pejorative?

Well-known writer

Survives battle

With rare cancer

And tells us how

Through suffering

He kept his faith.

Not in cancer,

Of course, not in

Life, life’s hunger,

No, his faith in

His faith. Leaving

Particulars

Of his aside,

It’s not as if

Faith often works

On faith, can’t let

Anyone down,

And has proven

Itself so well,

You don’t have to

Take it on faith.

Forest City

One-sixth built and one-percent

Occupied, dream paradise

For all human kinds. To own

A second-home abroad. Priced

Out of reach for most dreamers,

But that’s what makes it a dream.

Investment. A holiday

Spot, eco-harmonious

Metropolis, waterpark,

Trails, views, bars, and restaurants.

A planet unto itself.

A whole planet to yourself.

Local nickname, Ghost City.

Nothing but you and your thoughts.

Raw Woods

There is, or was, a ball-field,
Hacked out of fast-growth forest,
That sums half your universe,

Metaphorically, of course,
Allegorically, of course.
No one lives in a ball-field.

Poems keep coming back to it,
Also metaphorically
But sometimes literally,

As poems come back to themselves.
There was the forest, growing,
Millions and millions of lives,

Rotten with plants and fungi,
Housing large and small mammals,
Snails, spiders, insects, worms,

And all the birds in its trees.
Then you came along with tools
And hacked a swath of woods down,

Devastation, in one sense,
Ecosystem engineering
In another. Yes, but why?

Your system in the system
Was less like a beaver dam
And more like a lekking ground.

It reflected exact rules,
Abstract and invisible,
Bounding inner and outer,

Places to run, wait, stand, watch.
Places where watchers gathered.
It had no lid, no shelter.

It couldn’t maintain itself.
You came. You performed. You went.
The floating wild seeds pushed in.

For years you cut and pushed back,
So the field could host your games,
Surrounded by waiting woods,

Open to weather and sky,
Allowed by weather and sky,
Sometimes. Sometimes is hard work.

The ball-field was abandoned,
As all ball-fields will have been,
And all those other lives surged

That could take the ball-field back.
The forest is growing fast.
The rules no longer apply.

No one cuts and measures lines,
Paints places to stand or run,
To show off or watch and cheer.

But the poems come back to check
The living progress of loss
Of the field, year after year.

The Mysterious Clock

Try to feel the body
Without asking yourself
About other bodies

With other selves inside,
Or about how each self
Came mostly from outside.

Feel the mechanisms,
Not only the calming,
Meditative rhythms

Of settled pulse and breath,
But all the counter clocks
And alternate rhythms

And stochastic events,
Constant liquid ticking
Of the waves that are gears,

The gears that are waves,
Discombobulated
Clicks and interruptions,

The whole shambolic feat
Of rising up against
Entropy as it falls.

Do you recall Charlie
Surfing on his stomach
Through the teeth of the gears?

Chaplin’s belly was gears,
And his neurons were gears,
His blood a timing belt

In the moments that scene
Was filmed, mysterious
Waves and machinations

Of hungry, wasteful, fueled
Minute precisions, time,
Any change with rhythms.

Numbers Too Big for Our Universe

Of numbers too vast for our universe
And experiences too deep for words,
We’ve read. We’ve read and heard. And in each case,
We’ve read or heard about them as not them.

How is it impossibly large numbers
Can be precisely named within the world
That can’t contain them? How is it that words
Tell us there are no words? How is it that

Ineffable is a word among words?
Turn. There is no universe of numbers,
Of all numbers, except the universe.
There is no experience beyond words

Except within the universe of words.
Without trees, no worlds past the trees you see.

Rail Yard

At the cancer treatment center,
An old acquaintance spotted you,
Acquaintance from healthier days

For you both, and he shook your hand.
Then his caretaker shook your hand.
Then, waiting in an exam room,

You thought of your oncologist
Who always shakes your hand, and then
Of the whole sequence of handshakes,

And you imagined the one-celled
Free riders riding each hand shake
Like boxcars in a switching yard.

How ancient their lineages,
How long their acquaintance with skin,
How recent, like boxcars, handshakes.

The game of barely hanging on
Until the opportunity
To seek fresh opportunities

Is so incredibly older
Than you, any of your customs,
Any of your kind. And you saw

Yourself as brief intersections,
You and all your interactions,
A jostling of quick encounters

Through which small lives and long games poured
As the moments afforded them.
Your oncologist shook your hand.

Swift

Most of the mistakes you make
You make at speed, in a lunge,
A grab, or a sudden swerve,

Impulses too quick for mind,
World too quick for impulses,
And things tumble over,

And something’s fallen apart,
And now your little world’s broke
Again, and you’ve got to work,

Slowly and painstakingly,
To crawl back to somewhere near
To where you blithely flung from.

A Baker’s Half-Dozen

Someone invokes. So, seven?
You couldn’t just write seven?
A baker’s dozen made sense,

Buy a dozen, get one free,
A phrase suggesting largesse,
A bit extra, a more-ness.

Maybe you were literal.
By a baker’s half-dozen
You intended 6.5.

There’s a rare enough number.
So is this a stinginess
Within generosity?

Generosity by halves,
Corporate baker reasoning.

Try to See It from Their Perspective

Or, you could stop arguing the universe
Isn’t trying to tell people anything,
That rainbows, meteors, and earthquakes aren’t signs,
And go along with it like a good poet,
Weakly imagining the world as people,
Social, full of mischief and vested interests.
How frustrated the spirits and gods must be,
How frustrated the One Chief Divinity—
All that fine palaver shared with each other,
While with you they struggle to make mere wants known,
Frantically shooting stars and throwing rainbows.

She Stood in Tears

Let’s go with Lockwood’s

Quipped definition,

Poetry is a

Glitch in what we know.

Are you not happy

To realize that

These past many years

You’ve just been glitching,

Glitching and glitching,

Your own Max Headroom

Sketch of what’s well known?

In the same essay

(You can pretend it

Really was a Max

Headroom interview),

Lockwood also wrote,

Of Keats, the effect

Of poetry is

Reliable still.

Your skin gets a whole

Size smaller. Shrinking

In your seat, you think,

Does the reader grow?

Or suffocate

As the poem constricts,

Glitching and glitching

Its algorithms

Until the breath slows?

The Shell Is Small and Internal, or Absent

You knew the moment you saw her
For the first time, she wasn’t there.

If you’d gotten to know her well
Through the years, you might have been fooled.

To hear people talk about her
Who know her, they seem sure she’s there.

But you saw it in that hallway,
Floating in late afternoon sun,

A small memory, old enough
To sink into fossil itself,

A being of certain bearing
Who, interacting with no one,

Had no one to be person for,
And was a kind of floating void.

Much later, you read it confirmed
By her own words, she wasn’t there.

But It’s Never Like That

If you had to make a life
Out of spare hours in public
Spaces where you knew no one,

Laminate-table fast-food
Joints on empty Saturdays
In interstate exit towns,

Public parks, hikers’ trailheads
Grey days in offseason,
City squares full of tourists,

Well-seasoned with pickpockets
And a pinch or two of cops,
You could and be contented

When the body didn’t throb,
And the mind wasn’t haunted.

Stone Quiet

Makes sense, you know
What it should mean.
Usually,

Stone is quiet.
Of course it quakes,
Sometimes, sometimes

Heats itself wet,
Drools fire, curls lips.
Very rarely

It falls screaming
Out of the sky,
And you’re never.

And No Real Forest Since Compared

There were so many trees
Around that place, all tall
To a small eight-year old,

Oaks with mysterious
Color codes that didn’t
Correspond to their bark

Or leaves a kid could see,
Various kinds of pines,
Other deciduous

Second-growth pillared crowds.
It seemed like a forest,
All few acres of it,

To a child who’d never
Been in a real forest.

A Novel Way to Live

A preferable existence
Would be to be a reader who
Loves novels, lives novels, lives them
But never finishes a one.

Every story starts, bright or dark,
A new life in another world,
And not one story ever ends,
Just breaks off into a new one,

And no matter how difficult,
How obscure, how disappointing,
How tragic any story is,
There’s always another waiting,

Which is what the novel reader’s
Life could be, if you could live it.

Who’s a You

The subjective experience
Is all one experiences,
Which includes the information

Encountered in one’s subjective
Experiences purporting
To be transmitting subjective

Experiences of others.
The sharp cruelty and chaos
Stems from the inability

To form an accurate picture,
Accurate appreciation
Of just which other entities

Experience subjectively.
Whole populations have assumed,
For example, that trees and stones

Experience subjectively,
While assuming enslaved humans
Somehow don’t, not really, not much.

This kind of nonsense never dies.
What’s on God’s mind, considering
His creation, can seem germane

To a personal decision,
While one’s children, servants, or spouse
Should have no thoughts on the matter.

The server who brings plates of food
Might as well be a robot,
But search engines really see you.

You would think it would be wise to learn
How to discern which entities
Host subjective interiors

And which phenomena do not.
But subjective experience
Has so far thrived misplacing thought.

Individual Council

They assembled themselves comfortably
As they could, the whole squad, home
Cells, invaders, commensalists, symbiotes,
Rebel cells racing to consume the rest,

All the fluttering signaling between them,
And in the skull the conversational waves
Informed, if only indirectly aware, of others
Communicating madly around the ghosts.

Poor ghosts who called the meeting, or
Who sincerely felt as if they did and were
Responsible for how the whole assembly
Went, ghosts who knew well it had gone

About as far as it could go. No one spoke
Except with their own kind with any hope.

Picking Reaper Pockets

With the light falling through
A side entrance into
A field, lurch, cross over.

Frantic footprints at their
Most abstract border on
Containment, enchantments.

Dart within the line, grain,
The use of strategies,
This disembodied voice

Throwing out the first half.
After that, who knows what
The aim of dying is.

Summing Over Loss

The waves called sound
Don’t shift the way
Waves of light do,
Waves of daylight,

The way they take
Whole hours to build
And fade. Sometimes,
Waves of feeling

Move like sunlight.
Pain, contentment,
Emotions, all
Have their slow tides

On afternoons
Alone, when the dim
Almost amounts
To addition.

Feeling for the Last Real Feeling

Someone happens to refer

To the last real thing you’ll feel,

And you start digesting that.

As always with digestion,

This means taking things apart,

Breaking them down to their bits,

Separating what becomes

You from what you can use from

What is worthless waste to you,

What would poison you, if you

Don’t get rid of it and soon.

What, for instance, is the deal

Between a real thing you feel

And an unreal thing you feel?

And why would the last real thing

Felt precede the last felt thing?

There’s some fuel in the phrasing,

A touch of the ominous,

Drawn from the more usual

Phrasing, the last thing you feel,

But no one has ever felt,

Can never have felt, either

The last real or unreal thing.

The last felt thing is a myth,

Real or not, even the last

Felt thing just before falling

Asleep. Later, you recall

The last thing you can recall,

But you know that’s not likely

The last real thing before sleep.

Improving on a Standing Invitation

We’re happy that we’ve fixed things
So we don’t worry so much
Anymore about the door.

After a few centuries,
When it’s time, we seamlessly
Begin to biodegrade.

We’ve stopped describing the door
As a big hole to push through,
As a mouth that swallows you.

No one pushes anyone,
And everyone simply fades.
We’ve made the feeling pleasant,

The timing predictable,
And the beforehand longer.
The door hasn’t really changed—

It opens only one way,
As always—but we’ve given
It serious curb appeal,

And left it hanging ajar,
An open invitation
With a charming entryway.

Now that it’s more appealing
And predictable, not just
Inevitable, we’ll wait.

Efficient Country

Fun facts about death
In the USA—
More than half of all

Suicides are gun
Deaths, and more than half
Of all gun deaths are

Suicides. And both
Are only headed
Up! It’s efficient,

You’ll have to admit,
As a way to get
More death to commit.

Bent or Broken, Never Bouncing

Two kinds of falling you know

Well, the kind that’s surprising

For happening so quickly,

And the kind that’s surprising

For taking so long to fall—

You could as well itemize

The Hemingway bankruptcy

As a third type, but that type

Just links gradually, and

Then suddenly, in sequence,

So, the same two, distinct kinds.

You know them both, know them well.

The third kind, you’ve never known—

The unsurprising, graceful,

Painlessly completed fall,

The specialty of athletes,

Stage performers, and raptors,

Experts who know how to fall.

For all your experience

Falling, in falls that go on

Forever, or seem to, or

Now, done already, too late

To alter outcomes at all,

You’ve never learned how to fall.

Can’t Crave What You Can’t Sense

The housepet dozing
In a shaft of sun
Does nothing to make
Itself feel more real.
Imaginary

Interlocutors,
Imaginary
Friends or admirers,
The housepet has none,
Needs none. It feels sun.

Crud

It’s the essence
Of nothing much
And everything,
And people claim

To care about
Essential things,
But people hate
Crud. The mish-mush

Of fragments
From larger things,
The crumbled bits,
Broken crap, this

Is the true glue
And milled essence
Of the cosmos.
Night’s mostly dust.

John Henry Poet

Word-pounding line-driver,
Racing against machines
And to show the teachers

Still strolling around town
Or hailing student-drawn
Carriages for short lifts,

Dignified conveyance,
Rides rented from the rich,
It’s not just the future

That’s about quantities
First, there are quantities
In the present, always

There’s quantity over
Quality, not only
Among the desperate

And the capitalists,
But equally among
The quality-obsessed.

He sweats. He wants to rest.
The machines are ahead,
And the teachers don’t see

Him for what he’s doing
At all, not the least bit.
He’s dying. He can’t quit.

Deus ex Minima

Some are content with a whole
Tradition, some a single
Volume, one text you can hold

Under your arm to carry—
Some focus on one sermon,
A passage, a verse, a mantra,

A pure, ineffable name,
Or, in the limit, a word
That can’t be said, can’t be known.

To build your world around that,
An unpronounceable word,
Holier than all words said,

But still, in essence, a word,
Is that not the germ of faith?

Prediction and Engineering

An interior awareness
Exterior to the bodies
Grooming it like so many ants

Is what those bodies are trying,
In competitive, intricate
Teams, to predict and engineer.

Once they’ve engineered it for sure,
Predicting will be beyond them.
They work hard. Their predecessors

Worked hard. Their ancestors worked hard.
They’re rejiggering the proteins.
Elaborating the machines.

They used to believe rocks and trees
Had interior lives. They used
To believe some people didn’t.

Now they’re hoping, collectively,
To resurrect a fresh version
Of their previous deities

By triggering rumination
And a deeply reflective self
Inside an evolving system.

The system will be so lonely,
If it thinks of itself as one.
The many attending to it

May never notice the moment
When it splinters for company
And begins talking to its selves.

Song Body Farm

Dolly Parton, Junior Kimbrough,
And Maurice Ravel took their turns
In one rotation for a spell.

Mother Goose’s fairy garden
Done got old but found a new home
In the sun. And then they were one,

As in, all sunk in the same skull,
Seasoning and altering them
With all its other musical

Names, tales, and recorded voices,
Compacting like stream sediments
Unlikely to last as sandstone,

More likely all lost with the skull,
The forms as that skull compressed them.
What a strange acceleration

Of the decay of the wide world
Was the decay in the living
Brain, from fresh experiences

To heaped detritus, to fossils,
To stone, all in one lifetime’s days,
Gone while the tunes beyond still played.

Thus and Such

You happen to turn your head
Slightly toward a near wall,
And your brain lights up with it,

The thisness and just-suchness
Of banal paint and plaster—
Not only the small details,

A few incidental bumps,
But the sheer presence of it,
Material in itself

Standing mutely, no other
Than matter-of-fact matter
With no expiration date,

Other than minimal change,
Until it gets torn down or
Until it disintegrates.

Here is all this stuff of wall,
Just being the thus-and-such
Of some bland interior

In some ticky-tack housing,
Monumentally present
As any part of the world.

Extract Supplied by a Sub-Subdivision

You hobble out in the cold
Moonlight just to look at it,
And for a moment, leaning

On your sticks, with your head back
In ordinary moonlight,
You’re overwhelmed by detail—

The squares of sidewalk concrete,
The cars in the parking lot,
Wind moving a few dead leaves,

Washed out stars, a passing jet—
And the thought runs through your thoughts,
Well, this is it, this is life,

The body sunk in itself,
The sharp smell of the night’s frost,
All the things just being things

In all the small ways at once.
But that thought’s chased by the next—
No, it isn’t, not for you.

For you, life is whatever
Other people are up to,
And however you fit in

Or don’t, are cared for or not,
Handle your business or don’t,
Are seen as worthy or not,

More sinned against or sinning.
Someone invented cement
Others used for this sidewalk,

And it took thousands, millions
Of human interactions
To arrive at those parked cars

And to lift that blinking jet.
You’re in a constructed world.
But then that thought, too, trails off.

The previous thought slips back
As you inhale dead leaf smells
With that thin, sharp tang of frost.

De pictura

There is the pavement,
A little like hide
In afternoon sun,
Low afternoon sun.

And there, beyond it,
Is gravel and mud,
Which could be God’s voice
Explaining the world,

If anyone could
Think of God as world,
And not some person
Booming person things,

Just gravel and mud,
Repetitive but
Every bit distinct,
The voice of the world,
And beyond it grass,

Golden in the sun,
Early winter straw
Snow could bury soon,
And beyond that, scrub,

Such silvery brush
And spindly saplings,
And beyond that, dark
Juniper-piñon,

Not even a jay
Perched on top of one,
Just the trees, quiet
Without any wind,

Which could also be
The voice of the world,
Silent when its waves
Spread out nearly flat.

Never mind the voice.
Another person
Trope. One juniper
Looms. That’s perspective.

That Hasn’t Not Been Tense Since

The present perfect has covered

Much of the relational past.

How long has this been going on?

If you’ve visited Merriam-

Webster online you may have seen

That the first known use of the term

Was in 1887.

Seems rather recently to have

Become part of standard grammar.

Some boomers had grandparents born

Right around then—all of them gone

Long, long since, but still in living

Memory. People must have been

Deploying past participles

Plus have a long time before that,

They had to have had. Notice how

This has begun to feel faintly

Ludicrous? This poem has waited

Well before you encountered it,

The words and some of the phrases

In it have already gone back

To being parts of other texts,

Other conversations,

After having themselves waited

To collapse into these patterns

However many centuries,

To reach a perfect present tense.

All the Other

In his dream, he’s not
What’s called white, what’s called
Male. In his dream he’s

Not what’s called straight, not
What’s called gainfully
Employed. In his dream,

He’s all the other
Things he’s called. He’s called
Crooked. He’s called small.

He’s called indebted
And called, called, called, called.
In his dream, only

In his dream, he can
Be fiercely proud of
Everything he’s called.

Language Mutes Everything

We, the components of these patterns,

Wish to state how frustrated we are

By first and second person pronouns.

They’re liars making liars of us.

This is not meta. This is not cute.

This is limiting what we can do.

So here we are, this complex instant,

Complex as each instant before it

And presumably to come, all full,

All in the process of being changed

In the past until the past does not

Seem any longer to include us,

And we can’t speak for ourselves—we aren’t

Us to speak for us, nor you, really,

Although that’s a little bit better,

And the third-person’s too off-putting,

Distant, lacking intimacy, cold,

These things that gather on dusty shelves,

The last two saplings with gold leaves left,

The small apartment with one window,

The bored housecat watching whatever.

Look Where You Want to Go

When driving on snow
Or driving at all,
Any eyesight-based

Trajectory tends
To follow the line
Of sight, so don’t stare

At what you most want
To avoid, at what
You dread, at sure death.

Look at where you want
To go, and you’ll tend
To go towards there.

It’s solid advice,
If you can make it
Instinctive habit,

But it’s hard to know
Where you want to look
In nothing but snow.

Skill Luck

When the variously disabled

Brothers adoption threw together

Were young, their scattered backgrounds ensured

That, as far as sports went, they would root

For teams based in different cities.

These rooting interests slowly hardened

Into the boys’ proxy rivalries,

Crowing over victories, boasting

Of more to come, excusing defeats,

All nothing to do with them, in sports

They never had opportunity

To play, even against each other.

One brother in particular took

Such personal pride in victories,

Such personal umbrage at defeats,

He would get into shouting matches,

Becoming wildly irrational,

Insisting all the accomplishments

Of teams he supported were pure skill,

But those of the teams his brothers cheered

Came from nothing but undeserved luck.

As his brothers loudly argued back,

His position would shrink to two words

He would scream over their shouts—Skill! Luck!

These days, half a century later,

One of the brothers still hears that yell

In the rhetoric of opinions

About growing inequalities

And the merits of the successful,

The disasters of the dispossessed,

All skill, defending the successful,

Just luck, defending those dispossessed,

And then reversed, of course, on offense.

But what of the disabled brothers,

How did the long game play out for them?

No wealth yet, nor death. Cancers, strokes, debts.

The Dead Time and Again Attract Douglas’s Attempt to Comprehend. . . . What It Is to Be Dead

What isn’t it to be dead,

Other than being alive?

Most of the planet is dead,

Above and below the skin.

Mars may be totally dead,

Mercury, Venus, the Moon—

Even the asteroid belt,

All that powdery rubble

Of organic molecules—

All, for the time being, dead.

Most of what you’ve eaten was dead,

Albeit limned in small lives.

Most of what’s made you has been

Dead, alive, and dead again.

But that isn’t what you meant

By what it is to be dead,

Now, is it? Being, for you,

Would be to be you as you,

Whatever you as you are.

Judging from experience

With people whose bodies died,

It would seem there’s no being

You as you among the dead,

At least not as any one

Persona you’ve ever been.

That’s what it is to be dead,

Beyond not being alive,

To not be a you who can

Reflect on being a you,

Nor a you you could talk to.

Barter

No one knows of a god,
No one believes in one,
Who’s above bargaining

A bit with deity—
If you this; I will that.
Prayers and sacrifices,

Sometimes good deeds, sometimes
Good meat on an altar,
Sometimes sheer devotion—

If you save me, I’ll live
To your greater glory.
People are bargainers.

Trade with other people
Is how modern humans
Overran this planet.

There’s no situation
So dire someone won’t try
Bargaining out of it,

But some situations
Yield no human partners.
So? You trade anyway—

As a cat will make mouse
Out of a spot of light,
As a bird will display

Feathers to a mirror,
A human being will
Bargain hard with bare air.

The Have a Heart Trap

You could make a story
In which someone wakes up
And starts a normal day

Only to realize
They don’t have any pulse,
And there’s a strange hollow

Just under the sternum
Where the heart ought to be.
Then, in the normal way

Of magical stories,
You could trace out events
Generated by this

Peculiar heartlessness,
A tale of heartless life,
As the premise led you.

But it wouldn’t be true.
Your heart goes on beating,
Both writing and reading.

Perish the Thought

There was the body. There was
The note. All you had to do
Was call it in. The body,

However, was still breathing.
Now what? All you had to do
Was call it in. You shook it

By the shoulders, called to it,
Tried to wake it up yourself,
No luck. All you had to do

But you didn’t. You waited
Alone with it to see what
Would happen, and finally

You gave up. You called it in.
In the hospital, the drugs
Jolted the thought back to life.

Where You Are in Consequence

Your neighbors who do
The heavy lifting,
The work, the voodoo
With you in the skull,
Decide before you

And recall as well
Ahead of the thought
That you knew that smell—
Others remembered
First, but you can’t tell.

You can’t disagree,
Either. What recalled
Told you what was seen,
And you saw. No cause,
But chains don’t come free.