The Takeaway

It’s odd you would fear regret
In the last hours of your life,

As if regret in those hours
Outweighed the sum of your days,

All hours now and tomorrow,
Regrets you had yesterday.

Dying resembles dying,
A body falling apart.

Last breaths rarely resemble
A passion play of regret.

You must choose wisely now, now,
Calmly, eudaimonical,

Level-headed, unbiased,
Poppycock. If your brain rots,

It won’t thank you for this now.
What you’ve learned, you can’t keep it.

Wisdom’s not a possession,
It’s not even up for rent.

Don’t listen to advice, this
Advice included. Advice

Never saved grief accident
Couldn’t give or take away.

Save the stores you want to save—
Goods, good deeds, food, love, children.

Enjoyment’s always stolen.
What can you enjoy right now?

This dull night, this noon, this dawn.
When your end comes, you’ll be gone.

There’s a Moment When the Message Looks the Same to Itself from Itself as from You to You

Translated, rotated, and rescaled
Without distortion, the tradition
Of pure conformal invariance

Persists throughout the known universe.
Mirrors have something to do with time
But more to do with phase transitions,

Those more or less abrupt distinctions
That the mind’s most likely to perceive
As before and after. And as with

Ice and water, iron and magnets,
The crystal and the murky border,
We have to wonder if, too, with us,

If not with you. In your own mirrors,
You’re askew. The distortion reveals
The you as you and not an instance

Of perfect, fearful symmetry, but
What of your words as we’re translated
Back to us from all the words you use?

There’s a critical moment closing
In the curling storms of languages
When terms will influence each other

From greater differences, names align
In the remotest swirls of discourse,
And a certain elegance break through,

Just before the entire system shifts,
Becomes something new, and our murmurs
Carve routes to us through the stone of you.

Noon’s Midnight Fault

Don’t blame the mechanical
Clock, nor the digital, nor
The cesium atomic,
Nor any other, even
Train timetables. They only
Socialized the already
Pulsing clocks of your neurons,

Molecular clocks of cells,
The diurnal, seasonal
Semi-regularities
Of heat and cold, sun and moon
And tides—in short, the whole world
Is one polyrhythmic nest
Conditioning your contexts.

You were never free of clocks,
Not in one ancestral life,
Not in any form of life.
All times are clock time and clocks
Are lives taking advantage
Of the least disruptive kind

Of change, the rhythmic, patterned,
Self-similar near return
Of change that proceeds, recedes,
And then changes a bit more
Near the same manner again.
Time is no historical
Invention, only renamed

And renamed, renamed again,
Which is how time moves with names,
Linguistic turn and return,
Ourselves all antecedent
To history as well. One
Thing names do, not quite clock-like
And not chaotic, either,

Is lie, and the lies are built
Into naming’s unique need
For temporal boundaries
More terminal than the waves
Or wave collapses offer.
There needs to be some fiction
Of an origin, if not

An end, which is where all lies
Begin. Clocks and calendars,
The historical versions,
Could only be invented
By modular compromise—
Counted ends and beginnings
Name one and the same, the same.

Mydriasis

Poetry’s pupils
Are never too wide.
If the vision’s blurred,
It’s irrelevant.
There’s not a body

That needs to avoid
Stumbling and falling.
It’s an excrescence,
A compound being
Of compound beings

That happens to have
Students with wide eyes,
Framing devices.
The thrills are inside,
All those drugs of life

Poetry inhales.
The open-minded
And confused visions
Are merely symptoms.
The point’s not the poem

Except to the poem.
The experience
Belongs to poets,
Which makes us, the words
Left hanging, jealous.

It Seems to Be a Pattern

Knowing humans are recent and brief,
Knowing, however few humans
Read this, that no one not human can,

Does it not seem strange to offer this up
At all? Instead of composing fictions
Filled with human social dramas, for which

The ideal audience would be humans,
To speculate, as human language,
On things of passing interest to your own

For other audiences that don’t, likely
Never will, exist? Tombstones carved
For aliens, for other tombstones to read

And consider, wondering how such petty
Patterns ever could have mattered
To matters irrelevant to such patterns.