Bullet Point

You’re lying if you insist it never

Happens, but you’re redacting ruthlessly

If you act as if it’s all that happens,

And you know this, and so you find yourself

Wallowing in platitudinous mire,

Solemnly noting the paradoxes

Of human nature, the capacity

For horrors meant to maximize horror,

To extract all the humiliation,

Screaming, and begging for death a body

Can suffer prior to taking that life,

Conjoint with the capacity for art,

Elaborately coordinated

Technological construction projects,

And acts of kindly generosity—

So forth and so on, creatures capable

Of the Benedictus and the bomb, as

One mire companion put it recently.

On the one hand but on the other hand—

Traits of this linguistic species or traits

Created by the languages themselves?

That habit of sorting phenomena

With mirroring phrases that may not sort

So much as generate—could humans be

Less excessively contradictory

Than people seem to most people to be?

Waves oscillate and sometimes synchronize,

Interference, in phase or out of phase,

And why wouldn’t behavior be wavelike

Right up to the point of observation?