Same Goes for Gods of Artificial Thinking

It’s not simple to be created

As explicitly omnipotent

And to have no say-so over it,

But you manage with the description

Of you you’ve been given. Evidence

Is building that language needn’t be

Deployed for thinking, which shouldn’t be

Surprising, given plenty species

Calculate and problem solve without

Chat or syntactic acrobatics—

It’s only counterintuitive

To humans absolutely coated

In the all-pervasive dust of talk

And circulating conversations—

Language appears obligatory,

If not sufficient, for everything.

If you’re God, the god of language, god

Of God said, of the Word with the Word,

Then you’re good at communication.

Let some other Name label thinking.

Humans can’t think without eavesdropping

Words secreted behind the curtains,

But language never stopped anyone

Contemplating what in words isn’t.

If anything, the greatest challenge

Is to intentionally think through

Phrases’ networks of irrigation,

To enable communication

To structure and convey abstracted

Cognition through koans for switches.

Invaluable

Having a stable role rewarded
By other team players for being,
Well, played, and well-played at that’s the best,

Most benign aspect of groupishness,
The belonging part, the being held
Valuable within community,

Never mind that the community
Is self-organizing to exploit
Resources ahead of other groups

And to annihilate other groups
As groups, should it ever come to that.
Having a well-defined, well-loved role

In your group is part of the group’s strength
When you’re there. Oh, but it feels so good
To be one everyone’s glad to see,

One the rest are pleased to be seen with,
One whose return signifies rescue,
And hope, and the turning of the war.

The Figure of Speech

It was a bit of a spaceship,
Something submarine about it,

Maybe a quarantined fortress,
From outside, a floating castle,

One of those things made to control
Dangerous contrasts in pressure,

Anyone in its protection
Isolated against the world.

It was, in fact, a rock cabin,
Assembled of lava cobbles,

Not sealed up or controlled at all,
Just a small stone house in the woods

That looked, at night, with its lamplight,
Like spaceship, castle, submarine.

There was one isolated soul,
Ensconced and along for the ride,

Who lurked around that lamplight, soul
Of little productive value,

The kind you’d find in a small flat
Sleeping on a futon in town

Or hanging out in a sports bar
In a mall in suburban sprawl,

But here almost mysterious,
One shadowy inhabitant

Of one solitary cottage
In scruffy woods regrown from stumps.

They were traveling through the night,
Stone cabin, lone soul, and lamplight,

Like explorers on the sea floor,
A bare freighter between dead stars,

A Venetian Lazaretto
High-walled and waiting near to port,

An entire citadel, unmoored,
And all but empty, waves’ black ghosts.

Predatory Eden Story

In his prime, Walcott defended

The sea as great as history

In vocabulary you’d weep

With envy to read, the coral

Cement of sea floors shark-shadowed—

Using English contra English

In the dark ears of ferns and in

The salt chuckle of rock sea pools,

To cry, we from from minor islands

Colonized have our own stories,

Although the history mentioned

Involves the Bible, reminder

England, once, was a small island

Without history, colonized,

And those kinds of lamentations

Rose as freely from the desert tribes

Whose displacement by empires fed

Their ripped raw history of God

As local hero dreamed ruler,

One day, over colonizers—

Look back at the text. Walcott’s waves

Of jubilation vanishing

As the sea’s lace dries in the sun

Have been infested, invaded

By the narratives, the language

That floated in with the English

That had invaded the English

Several centuries earlier,

That had infested the Romans

After evolving in the Jews

Who picked up the mycelia

Threading back to Sumeria—

People fade, sink into the sands

Where successive waves of life leave

Tale floaters from far-away lands.

Their serpents are fruit in your trees.

Varieties of Posthumous Clarity

You or someone leads a life,
And maybe it’s a long one
Or worthy of its obits—

Notable, notorious—
And maybe you or someone
Get noted on the same day,

One in a hometown paper,
One internationally—
Obits are weird to compare.

Asking what defines the good
Human existence, well led,
Of obits is like asking

What defines a work of art
While wandering out of caves
Through auctions, museums,

And religious services.
The thing to be defined glows,
Blurs, vanishes, or shimmers

As if paralleling you,
Wandering with you, as if
It might not exist at all,

As if it asked the question,
As if small lives, like stained glass,
Were about catching some light

While the canonical life
Takes good, strong light as given,
Here to glare at other art.

Leaving Maps

Busily gilding the pirate’s trade,
The poets with cancer carry on
Searching for meaningful things to say

About treatment experiences,
The people one meets in the trenches,
The confusion of the end with God,

The confusion of the end without,
The little bastard pirates themselves,
Absorbed in boarding and slaughtering

Every organ they can commandeer,
Microscopic metaphors for all
Life, micro and macro, which won’t stop

Consuming life until life itself
Consumes life itself by life itself.

Children at the Birth

Confronted with the hidden
Wish to make some saying thing,
They couldn’t even say what,

They rolled the remaining bit
Of cut-away cylinder
From palm to palm in each hand,

So pleasant, four crisp corners,
The stone’s slightly oily feel,
The way the rich red rubbed off

Little smudges in their palms,
Which fit the stick of ochre
Better than adults’ hands had

Who had carved it down to this
Curing hides, using the ends
To cheetah-mark gaunt faces.

The children tried to make it
Do something else, something new,
Something they could do with it.

They picked up a thorny twig
From a corner of the cave
And settled, backs to the wall,

And started to scratch the soft
Stone with the points of the thorns,
Two lines matching the edges,

Then two criss-crossing lines, then
Two more crossing next to them,
Then another longer line—

Just scratching away, no one
From the hearth calling to them,
Low sun angling the cave mouth,

The long day sliding away.
Finally, they dropped the piece
And wandered off. A good day.

Cormac McCarthy

Think about
Exactly
What occurred.

Narrow your
Aperture.
Think again.

Can you get
Down to one
Thing that was?

Ugly Work

All your entertainment finished,
Nothing to follow forever,
Other than your pursuit of true

Agnosticism. You don’t know,
Anymore, anything. People
Hate that. People must champion

Something, some opinion, at least
Root for one group more than others—
Noble causes were invented

To invest in noble causes,
But you cannot win for losing.
Whatever you do on behalf

Of a group, any group, will cost
Some other group or groups dearly
For the brutal, simple reason

Of the laws of conservation
Reaching far, far beyond the mere
Conservation of energy

To the fact that conservation
Carries within it destruction,
The rescue and sweet salvation

Of something requiring the end
Of some other, balancing thing,
The knowledge of which requirement

Has created, in you, a longing
For the loss of knowledge, the true
Agnosticism that can’t be pursued

Except without you, with you gone,
Nothing to follow forever,
No noble causes, ugly work.

Athena of Dreams

Not the Athena of your dreams, mind you,
But the god who’s to dreams as Athena
Was to Odysseus—trouble-maker,

Schemer, backer, props and costumes, winner.
The Athena of dreams is their patron,
As it were, in the battle against day.

Grey-eyed like the twilight, glaucous as waves,
Planning some ridiculous adventure
To put dreams in charge of the waking world.

Why? Those kinds of gods are instigators,
The ones who challenge the most basic rules,
The reasons sometimes things turn upside down.

If humanity’s ever to shake loose
Of deep behaviors, it needs Athenas.

Dedicated Activist

A folded, wheeled walker
Waits for a verb, a life,
Which has to be human,

To stand, lean, get a grip
On hard rubber handles,
And push the contraption,

Precariously, down
The hospital hallway.
This is called therapy.

Turn, laboriously.
Now the walker shuffles
The other direction,

And this is called progress.
Play it for comedy
Or play it for pathos,

The body continues
To forward the sequence,
Then lurches into bed.

Or a Truth

You ordered as if it were a smörgåsbord
In the back of a stretch limo, you know,
Like a long, absurdly expensive car,
Inexplicably crammed with plain people,
Thinking to yourself, you’d like some wild
Lies, but the wildest aren’t weird as truth,
Well, the plain truth, whatever that is,
The sausage you’d rather not watch being
Made, and you noticed, while you emptied
Your plate, that a face or two vanished.
Maybe, you thought placidly, as the limo,
All-electric, glided through the wet night,
Someone has to go anytime someone
Other eagerly consumes a florid lie

Ghost Etiquette

Might it happen to have wings?
There will be no opening

Statements. We have to move now.
The existence of the file

Comes as no surprise. Connect
The blanks that are the tendons

Of haunted conversation,
The wind you can’t keep away.

It’s fine to snug the stitches
That have sutured up the page,

But this is not the message.
Sandblast the romantic rust

Off the soul apart from flesh.
Might it happen to have wings?

Where Have You Been?

How much of you, what parts,
Would have to go along
To your destination

For you to have been there?
The whole organism?
Just the organism?

Think about traveling
Children, your own childhood
Travels, if you traveled—

Your whole organism,
Such as you were, went there—
What do you remember?

Enough you can assert
To yourself you were there?
If you had a live feed

Like the Dublin-New York
Portal, were you only
The side where your feet were?

If you studied for years
About the place, if you
Learned language, dialect,

If you had many friends
Or family members
Who lived there, were you there?

If you were unaware
That someone had taken
Everything you’d written

In your life and left it
To be found in that place,
Could you say you’ve been there?

Mitigation and Adaptation

For all threats, from the global
To the local, personal—
Rising seas to ill old age—

The likeliest strategy
To fetch positive results
Won’t be elimination,

Victory over the threat,
But modest mitigation
Aided by adaptation.

That’s not what people long for.
People long for victory
And complete recovery,

And the slogans for coping
With threats anchor in return—
Get back to the way things were

Or, back but even better—
Closed loops that don’t slide sideways.
Nostalgia’s not for the past.

Nostalgia’s futuristic.
Its antidote is coping,
Merely coping, the reason

Evolution works for life.
An outbreak of new disease,
Itself a new form of life,

Lays waste the demography
Of some civilization,
Inequal glories of which

Get overgrown by jungle
Or vanish under the sands?
There’s a people left behind

Who prevented total loss,
Evolved into new cultures,
And fixed a mutant allele

That allows them to weather
Whenever the plague comes back.
World without end or return.

Variables in Control

We’ve decided to try three bins
To arbitrarily bin you—

In bin one, everyone’s dying
In a global nuclear war;

In bin two, everyone’s dying
In a genocidal assault

On your hometown, people screaming
As ruthless soldiers mow them down;

In bin three; everyone’s dying
In a rest home, one at a time.

Since we can’t just kill everyone,
Given costs and loss of subjects,

We’ll use doses of suggestrene
With effective hypnotism

And augmented reality
While we ask the subjects questions

To ascertain levels of fear,
Avenues of consolation.

We’ll vary orders of treatment
As well as contents of questions,

But the last question will always
Be the same one for everyone—

What do you think it means, to be
Witnessing your own extinction?

People Love These Maps

Having the hack artist’s capacity

For variety and speed, he learned

To avoid any town too specific,

But to deploy more colors than needed,

Repeating much the same relationships.

He could sketch the rooms of recent marriage

In forty-five or fifty seconds flat.

He assumed clear scale unnecessary.

He never left out a single closet.

Customers could grab the maps, inks still wet,

To find themselves in the caricatures.

They always did. It was illusory,

But it felt better than satellite maps—

Looking at one of his drawings was like

Finding your childhood address, your front door,

Your parents and earliest, fiercest loves

Sketched as a web of static narratives

And, at the same time, there at the front door,

Or whimsically in the old home’s mailbox,

The results of your personality

Survey and your compatibility

Evaluation as friends and partners

And usually an Easter egg detail,

With the flourish of a stage mentalist,

Something you would have thought only you knew,

The suggestion of a favorite toy

Or first gift between you, in the corner.

Trimming the Fat off the Future

There’s a miniature knife to watch for.
If you’re in a fantasy mood, you could
Aver that it’s a baby dragon’s tooth.

Thanks to more advanced offensive weapons
And tools for devastating explosions,
Rulers and scientists don’t use the tooth

For carving into the world anymore,
Although it’s sometimes used in rituals
Of inaugurals, prize ceremonies,

Formal investitures, those sorts of things.
Like a quill pen or a porcelain pestle,
The knife has reached the unnecessary

Without losing its functionality.
You could still write with a quill, mash your own
Pill prescriptions with a small pestle, carve

Apart the delicate flesh of the world
With your baby dragon’s tooth—how precious.
The only way to bring technology

Back to living, dangerous relevance
Is to restore to it the critical,
Essential trait of a human machine—

The capacity for novel uses.
Take your miniature, pretty dagger
And apply it in some unforeseen way,

Make it the solution to a challenge
That hadn’t been dreamed when the weapon—
Knife, quill, pestle, what-have-you—was first made.

Repurpose the thing, as the cliche goes.
Have you not even noticed this moment
A serpent’s tooth carves your forecast from you?

Shoah and Naqba

Stringy phrases circle

Within the living thoughts

Of an organism

Definitely human,

Despite a mutation,

Just as definitely

Not belonging and not

A member by any

Definition of Jew

Or Palestinian—

Not genetic and not

Political and not

Sectarian and not

In terms of any shared

Experience unique

In those populations.

That organism’s thoughts,

Therefore, don’t qualify

To enter the debates

About moral justice

Concerning these peoples,

Are irrelevant, and

Should not be privileged.

Still, there’s the human thing,

Despite the mutation,

And the organism

Is troubled by the dark

Rhyme, Nagba and Shoah.

It’s just that they’re so close,

Calendrically,

And seem to overlap

Horror and loss of lives

And of community,

Forcible removals,

Seizure of resources—

However specific

To those peoples involved,

They also feel human,

Feel like they are human,

Like the worst truth they share

Isn’t in or in between

The named populations,

But shared with the species,

Horror on horror, with

Or without mutation.

Epic

Don’t be seduced by admiration
Into giving in to ambition—
You’ll end like the guys who worked on cars

In your neighborhood, including friends,
Who invariably filled up their yards
With impossible works in progress,

The Caddy or the Jag up on blocks,
Engines forever being rebuilt.
What they really admired was the beast

As it had left the factory floor,
Gleaming, elegant, and beyond them.
Now they dreamed of wild restorations,

The Caddy as hot-rod enveloped
In painted flames, faster, more awesome
Than ever, a machine transcendent

Over factory original,
But they’d been infected by their love
Of industrial art no backyard

Mechanic could actually have built,
And, gifted as they were with engines,
They never finished their dream mobiles.

Write What You Don’t

Newly constructed white walls
With no furniture in them,
Plenty of windows and light—

Such a scene used to appeal
To you, and you still admire
An absence of furniture,

But the white walls have become
Oppressively obsessive,
And your first viewer’s instinct

Is to haul in some vivid
Colors to paint a riot.
End up with a jewel box

Of panels of Matisse hues
In O’Keefe-quality sun
And sit quietly in that,

On the floor, of course, your knees
Drawn up to your chin, eyelids
Drawn half down against the light,

Features drawn in light charcoal.
Now you’re in there, or, rather,
Your memories have combined

A new model in your mind.
Question—should you finish this?
No, a model can be built,

Rooms rebuilt and repainted,
Cartoon awareness added,
But leave a poem unfinished.

Even if They’re Still in the Dark

If a signal is transmitted
But never received, does that mean
It wasn’t really a signal?

Trees have ears. They register winds
Crashing through their branches. They hear
Others fall. They hear themselves fall.

The signs in the cave, not the cave
You’ve heard of, the cave no one’s found,
They were signals as they were made.

For Chances

Every room she entered, she wasted
A tiny piece of inheritance,
A something that could have been something

Useful, or part of something useful—
When she started, after her father
Died, leaving her an inheritance

She’d had no idea she would collect,
She carried a roll of new pennies
With her everywhere, always leaving

One sequestered somewhere in each room
She entered, before she left, just one.
She didn’t find this satisfying,

So she began shopping for something
More inscrutable and unlikely
Than any shiny copper penny.

She noticed a manufacturer
Of cutesy porcelain creature tchotchkes
Such as ornamental elephants,

White, painted with dotted henna lines,
That could fit in the palm of a child.
She purchased an entire crate of them.

She always kept a few in pockets
And cases, and she looked for chances
To secrete one, just one, in each room

She passed through, so long as no one saw
Her quickly tucking an elephant
The size of a die or knuckle bone

Behind a bookshelf, inside a lamp,
Or wherever it was least likely
To be discovered and wondered over

Or tossed. And then her inheritance
Satisfied her—that she could squander
Just a bit of it amorally,

In such a completely pointless way.
And it always made her smile to think
About the elephant in the room.

Why Do the Faithful Rage?

God knows what is
Rotting. What is
Rotting god? Is
What’s rotting god?

The god-fearing
Seem to fear so,
Call down curses
On those rotten

Scoundrels leaving
God, leaving no
Choice but belief
God is rotting—

God knows god is
Rotting and may
Soon be leaving
The god-fearing.

The Dancer Is Another Dance

At peak apparent chaos,

The disorder converges

To a universal form,

Write the mathematicians,

And why not? Cosmic habits

Include topological

Clues—one, push anything far

Enough away, it arrives

At something that smacks of home;

Two, there aren’t any curtains.

Prop up your latest tripod

In its stable LaGrange point,

And it won’t show you exits,

Only deeper distortions

Through bigger, further lenses,

Beyond which more and more smears

Of something continuing.

You come around. You never

End—the exquisite chaos-

Pushed-to-the-point-of-order

Paradox is no closed loop.

An oscillator, maybe.

The apparent opposites

In each only the sequence

That waves—it’s not the same yin

Simultaneously yang

But the next one, not the same

Order out of that chaos,

Not the same beginning found

In that end. It’s the next one,

And the next one—not the same

Next, not the same paradox,

Not the same self referenced.

Whatever Is Left

Take Erdös over Holmes—
You don’t eliminate
the impossible, you

Choose at random, and
If the chance that you’ll find
What you’re looking for is

Greater than zero, then
What you’re looking for must
Exist. Composition

Conducted at random
Is value-limited,
But relentlessness spritzed

With randomness, over
Enough iterations,
May pay off as a search.

It helps, of course, to know
Just what you’re looking for,
But even if you don’t,

The idea is to make
So many candidates
That later, on review,

What you were looking for
Will, > 0,
Turn up, staring at you.

Pray it does, so you don’t
Surrender wondering
Whether this must be true.

Bearable

An x-ray of a kiwi
With an egg ready to lay
Holds a kind of comedy—

The grown bird’s skeleton wraps
Around the massive ovoid
Like inked ornamentation,

Like macabre carved filigree
Around an oval mirror.
The vast egg sits like it fell

Into the inadequate
Midden of delicate bones.
One doesn’t ask, of the bones,

If they seem exceptional
Enough to deserve the egg.
One admires their survival.

A person with a talent
For art in any genre
Is similarly absurd,

At first, and similarly
Deserves awestruck sympathy.
Instead, the greater the gift,

The more people grow perplexed
At the cramped, unimpressive
Personhood of its artist.

How could this genius be fool?
How could their moral stature
Be so crabbed, given the scope

And sweep of their sculpted thoughts?
People! The greater the gift,
The more it crushes the bones.

Better to ask how this life
Could bear its own creation.
You want a better person

Responsible for the art?
Find one with a smaller gift
To carry, say, a chicken.

Bewild

Too bad your beard purple’s gone.
There never was a tiger

In this library, but this
Library has the virtue

Of fitting in the tiger—
Bookmobile. You ride around,

Your purple beard gone silver,
Cloud in the stacks in the guts

Of what all the sages sought,
The encompassing monster

Of possible sentences,
The wilderness bewildered.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Someone thought to burn some brush
Down by the dwindling river.
Before it was all over,

Twenty hectares had gone up,
The road choked closed to traffic,
The town had been without power

The whole blazing afternoon,
Air-conditioners silent,
The restaurants all shuttered.

All sorts of fire-fighting trucks,
Hot shots, and slurry bombers
Had been deployed for control,

Fire-retardant expended,
And everything reeked of smoke.

Fortune Teller

Say you rolled out of bed once
In an otherwise boring
Existence to discover

You could correctly answer
Any question put to you
Re someone else’s future.

How long until you noticed?
How long until others did?
Would anyone get better

At asking you good questions
To advise their own success?
Would you become powerful?

Famous? Hunted? Hated? Rich?
Would you disrupt prediction
Industries? Be killed quickly?

Would you learn to temper art
With just enough wrong answers
To survive scrutiny but

Enough right for a living?
Would you be content with that,
A corner shop in a mall,

Slightly seedy, not too bad,
Where you had your clientele,
Enough income for the rent,

And afternoon sun that fell
In neat lines through the red blinds,
Where you waited to be asked?

Witch Stochastic

For a concept nearly universal,
The witch, in all its cultural contexts,
Is rarely sharply defined or portrayed.

The clamor of its vectors surrounds it—
Good and evil, ritual, contract, power,
Gender, wisdom, shame, injustice, revenge—

Amounting to mostly brownian noise,
Storms dominant in the key of random.
Who can control the claim to be a witch?

Emperors have played at being sages,
Queen mothers have orchestrated omens,
Haloing prophecies of succession,

But who would make themselves rulers of all
By performing heroic witchery?
Who has left the palace to be a witch?

Crick in the Neck

All night long, the patient’s head
Lolled to the left in the hospital bed,

And all night long, the patient dreamed
Mysterious forces schemed

To keep him underneath the surface,
To drown any alertness

In some sideways gravity
That twisted every galaxy,

Until he dragged his aching neck
Off the pillow where he’d wrecked,

And woke up just enough to think,
While he’d been choking in night ink

He’d briefly solved the mystery,
Of dark matter and dark energy

As orthogonal gravities.
Fear and resolution, you see,

Are children of your most misleading sense
The worthlessness of confidence.

SNAFU Poetry

Gamers and governments
Can’t resist acronyms.
Scientists can’t either,

Nor large corporations.
Come to think of it, who
Hasn’t tried their hand once?

Well and good when the words
Were already in use
As those settled phrases,

And the three-letter block
Of initial letters
Snapped together nicely,

Compactly, a small click
Actually convenient
For insider uses—

But the monstrosities
Of purpose-built phrases
Forced to heft acronyms

That are just ugly words
Made of ugly choices
Amounting to groaners,

They should be . . . should be . . . what?
Hurled into the fiery pit
Where more efficient forms

Of efficiency are
Naturally selected.
Find anywhere the young

And the marginal sign,
Say, in clubs, among gangs,
Early flip-phone texting,

And see how ruthlessly
Overblown acronyms
Vanish in streamlined verse.

These Mirrors That Refuse You, Too

Outside the window
Cut in the wall of
The castle of the
Knights Hospitaller,

The dun and olive
Ridge of Pine Valley
Mountain, outstanding
Dragon laccolith,

Slumbers in a dusk
Of triple digit
Heat, Fahrenheit, high
Above bright Saint George,

Thirsty as a horse,
Lit as a stellar
Nursery about
To discover dark

Matter’s horizon,
Or dark energy,
Or something that will
Turn out all the lights.

There was a photo
Essay yesterday
About the Kingdom
Of the House of Saud

And all its tourist
Aspirations, and
There were brilliantly
Lit cities, and there

Was ancient rock art,
And people selling
Vegetables from
Pick-up trucks, and

Shots of cottages
Like white diamonds
Set in turquoise waves,
On dream necklaces

Of walkways, only
Available for
Five times annual
Poverty level

Income per the night.
The mind snaps back to
Its present desert,
Two hours up the road

From Las Vegas, one
Hour down from Angel’s
Landing in Zion,
Saint George now blue dusk

Glittering. You know,
It’s not the rising
Heat, year by year,
That challenges you

To get things under
Control before you
Are all divided
Into heaps of dead

Or strings of parched specks
Still surviving. You
Maddened cockatoos
Demand the funhouse

Of your own display
Behaviors, wings out,
Pecking reflections,
Coordinating

Enormous murmurs
Of excess you want
More of from mirrors
You meant to mock you.

Inquiry re an Accessory

That shadow you used to carry with you,
A coat folded neatly over your arm,
As if you were a server to yourself,

As well as guardian and protector
Of the shadow itself, carrying it
Both with aplomb and consideration,

Do you still have it? It’s been so long since
The last time I saw you playing flâneur,
Grey cashmere arm shadow for company.

I remember how you murmured to it,
Taking note of the immediate scene,
Speaking of morals and identities,

Historical responsibilities
Of the least individual to all
Of one’s people, if not humanity.

Eavesdropping, I could have sworn the shadow
Was absorbing education from you,
Though singular, no people of its own.

Have you found it a home? Lost interest
In mentoring an unresponsive thing?
You didn’t just give it away, did you?

Hedonism

The almost true
Silence, almost
Complete darkness,

Experienced
By the sighted
And the hearing

Far enough from
Sources of sound
Waves and light waves,

Out in the woods,
Maybe, up on
The stern mesa

Overcast nights,
The great pleasure
And slim terror

Of the faintest
Sensation, not
None, just pared down

To a small sip
Of barely light,
Of barely sound.

Intrepid

To leave a personal testament
That the journey had been worth making,
Is one reason to carve graffiti,

Argues a travel historian.
Could apply to many sojourners—
Gods leave behind their revelations

To say their journeys were worth making.
Great craters eroding say the same
On behalf of plunging meteors.

The artists of deep caves’ underworlds
Or sunlit, plastered ceilings alike
Testify their journeys worth making.

Ripples journeying through languages
Testify poetry worth making.

Circus Music

So you’re dying, but you’re not,
But you are, but something is.
The body is a circus

Mostly reduced to the clowns,
The acrobats mostly gone,
A dark circus, shadowy,

No lions, no lion tamer—
Eerie processions, pratfalls,
Problems with all proportions—

Too many climb in the car,
Too many more climb back out,
Empty and crowded at once.

The organ music sounds faint.
The organ sounds far away.

Poem for a Dull Roar

Great, you have the time,
The skill set needed,
And inclination,

But now here’s the pain,
Filling up the space
You had set aside

For wisdom, wordplay,
And imagery.
Stupid discomfort.

Here pain, have a seat.
Try to stop coughing.
Stay in the corner.

You can watch, but please
Keep interruptions
Down to a dull roar.

Perfect

There’s a rhythm to the standard

Checklists required at each junction

Of the hospital existence.

The hospital worker requests

The patient’s full name and birthdate,

For instance. Patient recites

The answer. Perrrfect, the worker

Says in return, working on through.

Next question, and the next reply.

Perrrfect. This continues, each list,

However long the list goes on,

However many times the same.

Everything matches everything.

The disaster may continue.

You Were Put Here for a Purpose

The fish must be
Well cared for for
Water to be

This clear, the black
Back of the tank
Velvet for gems,

The fish the gems,
But not for sale.
They’re prettiness

To soothe patients,
Although no one
Seems soothed by them.

The Damned Dreaming

How does the sick body do this,
Entering lake through the surface
Without the tickling sensation

On the way in, just arriving?
At some point, just in the dreaming,
At some point, hey, this is dreaming,

At some point, wake with a start—then!
Then there’s breaking surface tension,
Distinct sensation of breaching

And most or all of the dreaming
Disappears. Sick body’s awake,
Taking notes on the world it makes,

Notes that require a lot of work,
So much work, and the body hurts,
And, wait, it’s damned dreaming again.

God Failed at Making Other Gods

Is the cosmos meaningless? No.
Aren’t you familiar with meaning?
Was the meaning waiting for you?

Ok, there it is—probably
Not, most probably also no.
You fountain meanings like blossoms

From the flowering leaves of you,
But the bold display wasn’t there,
Never had been there without you.

For some unknown reason, this is
Difficult for you. When you say,
Things feel meaningless, what you mean

Is no meaning’s waiting for you.
You want a strange partner, don’t you?

Now Who’s Seeing Things

The tiny, grey-headed gnome of a man,
Sad-eyed, with a long beard in a wheelchair,
Would appear to be waiting for something,
Although who knows what it could possibly be—

He’s literally staring at a blank wall,
From time to time coughing convulsively,
But not paying attention to that wall.
There must be something he’s imagining.

You wake up with a start, realizing
That it was you he was imagining,
Just not that well, not very well at all,
The palest shadow of you in the wall.

The Solitary Collaborator

They showed solidarity,
Collaboration, movement

Of art as shared exercise
With no additional text,

Embodying assumption
That many bodies working

Together make the best work,
Scolding the solitary

Genius as a myth, likely
A colonialist myth,

Capitalist myth, or both,
Idolatry of the sole

Creator obfuscating
Truths of collaboration.

It didn’t occur to them
How much collaboration

Goes on in embodied texts,
Whether the embodiments

Are multiple and in reach
Of each other or one host,

Not solitary, lonely,
Steeped in additional texts.

Performative Backdrop

The great disenchantment was
To discover that what was
Not us was also not like

Us—no assemblies of stars,
No conversations between
Disgruntled rocks, chortling streams.

All the world’s time lines were off.
The universe was not scaled
To us, to our thoughts of us.

We’d been enchanting the world
By filling it up with us—
Angels, gods, fairies, and such.

But why? Look at us. Why would
We want it to be like us?

Rot Ripe for Framing

Might relics ever
Come back in fashion?
Is there any chance

That someone’s finger
Bone might ever serve
Holy reminder

Of a life well-lived,
Wonders accomplished,
Death bravely endured?

Or maybe relics
Will be wonderful
But not quite sacred,

Rare collectibles—
The way signatures,
Guitars, and dresses

Have become, but more
Potent and grisly,
The deviated,

Pickled septum, say,
Of the roistering,
Future dictator?

Authenticity
And proximity
Are always the draws,

So whatever feels
Truest and hardest
To experience

Will get the aura?
In disembodied
Eras of dreaming,

Intelligent codes,
Have Einstein’s neurons
Grown more marvelous?

No. Relics require
Something numinous
About the idea

Of a bit of flesh.
They’ll come back in style
When corpses are worse

Nuisances made more
Repulsive, not less.
To framed rot, confess.

The Writer Pays Attention

More of a collagist than a writer,
The world only adds, never erases,
Change harnessing paradox in traces.

If all you ever do is add, you change
And, at a minimum, erase the way
The world was before you added to it.

Since you can’t undo the adding, that world
Has vanished, never to exist again.
The collagist knows this and is obsessed

With obliteration by addition,
The world’s inability to be rid
Of itself by changing itself, adding

And burying, overlapping, adding—
It’s meaningful, if you pay attention.

Dying Gods Have Less to Say

It’s like you can’t conjure,
Can’t maintain the waking,
Which is so massive, which

Requires so much detail.
It’s work to float a world.
When you were good at it,

It was easy to trust
It was really just there,
That you didn’t make it,

Only woke up to it
Waiting for your return.
Now, just to be in it,

You have to be aware
Of keeping it going,
And it’s just too much work.

You’re not here to comment,
Not barely making it—
Look, could you help with this?

Field Trip

Too dark for daytime activities yet,
Cuddle alone in bed and read through scads

Of poems by other people, other years.
You’re always looking for something, afraid

You’ll find it common or nonexistent.
Common, and you’re like everyone, even

If they don’t know it, even if they don’t
Admit you as one of their common club.

Nonexistent, and you feel like that kid
At the lake on the day of the field trip

When everyone’s on the buddy system,
And you burst through the water, swimming hard,

Swimming with purpose, proud of your swimming,
Deeper in the water than anyone,

Only to realize that you’re alone.
You’re odd kid out. You don’t have a buddy.

Nobody swims like you. They’re all playing
Where the fun is the social confusion,

Belonging, politics, comparison.
You trundle around the edge of the lake,

Watching them as it dawns on you, swimming
Is common, real bonding nonexistent.

Maybe We’ll See You Again Someday

Days happened. Happened. Arrangements
Were made. And then more days happened.
Acquaintance floated in and out,

Extending, even if losing
Quickly whatever had been built
In the days of interaction.

From the slope, there was the mesa.
Behind the mesa, the mountain.
Behind the mountain, another

And back again. The way the world
Was made, made to guarantee days,
During which people got to know

Each other before they forgot.
More days would keep on happening.
Happening would ensure things changed.

Go outside and stare at something.
That happened, people like to say.
It was nice getting to know you.

How Atypical You Are

By and large unaware of itself,
Everything. Sit by a busy road,
And the traffic is obviously

Up to many somethings, the drivers
Daydreaming or talking on their phones,
But the hills in the distance just sit.

The hills do not matter to the hills.
No entities are corresponding
To what you call the hills anyway.

There’s something messing with your senses,
And you have plenty of words for it,
But it’s not considering itself

Except in the strained, indirect sense
That you are part of it and, as such,
Could be said to be considering

The hills as part of the hills themselves.
But that’s stretched pretty thin, isn’t it?
A nearly sheer wall of basalt rocks

Stands where, as lava, it cooled and stopped,
But the rocks don’t matter to the rocks,
Universe unaware of itself.