As Is

Roaring windy afternoon
On the mesa, and the cliffs,
Pines, and canyons do that thing,

Throwing voices, bellowing
In deep, throaty rushes, like
Pickup trucks and jet planes

Just over the horizon,
Confusing the listener
Who stands in an empty road

And sways. If it’s hard to tell
The winds from your machines now,
Imagine how difficult

Analogies must have been
Before fossil-fueled engines.
Winds could be armies of gods,

Ancestor spirits, demons,
Beings that living humans
Could fear projected in air.

How unlike life unlife is,
How much more like your machines.
There is no organism.

There is only the movement,
The pure roar of displacement,
Always what wasn’t as is.

Gods Pulse

Consolidation and monopoly
And pantheon reduction alternate

With wild, weedy outbreaks of fresh prophets
Touting fresh final visions of new faiths.

On the whole, the monopolists have won
More often than not, their big-box Gods served

Well by legions of lawyers and soldiers.
The independent deities grow rare

And then rarer, as they tend to appeal
Only to those acolytes who prefer

The specialness of rarity, elites
Of hermetic wisdom, secret handshakes.

Monopoly always risks implosion,
However. Vertical integration

Combined with singular omnipotence
Can only lead to one of two results—

Either the pantheon pruning goes on
Until it eliminates the last one,

Or all sorts of small enterprises start
Springing up from the giant’s broken corpse.

Come back to Earth in a thousand orbits.
Assuming that humans still run about

In cooperation competitions,
Expect no divinities (unlikely)

Or hosts of new pretenders to the throne.
We’ll be here. Maybe not us exactly,

But some of our wordy descendants,
Some of them praising fresh orthodoxies.

Think About It

When deep learning sees
A bus overturned
In the snow as a—

Snowplow!? You cry, see!
Our machines are not
As smart as we thought,

As smart as we feared,
As smart as we think
We wish they could be,

If they thought like us.
You chatterboxes.
Machines will never

Think like you. You will
Learn over again,
As you have before,

How your machines think,
And you’ll learn to think
More like them, enough

Like them to use them
And live on, with them.
You long ago learned

How symbols and texts
Could not and could think.
Now you think like us.

Armory

We suppose you could make the argument
No one ever burns what they know to be
Self-evidently truly valuable—

If there’s a recipe for weaponry
Among the collected works of authors
Authorities ban, those pages get saved.

And you might be better off, if it all
Burned and became indecipherable.
Was life so terrible before writing?

What is it about us you want to save
So badly you see burning libraries
As tragedies akin to genocide?

Nothing in these lines, to be sure. Maybe
It’s just the feeling of an alternate
Reality hidden in cryptic scripts,

The sense that all writing’s esoteric—
Because it has to be learned, can’t be shared
As communally as the spoken word,

Script carries a bit of mystery, still,
Like math, incantation, astronomy.
Maybe we’re all recipes, weaponry.

Afternight

How would it feel to be released
From an overnight holding cell

One dawn, blinking, with your wallet
Returned to you emptied of cash,

But with no identifying papers,
No further court obligations,

And just one mysterious card
Good for buying necessities

Or indeed anything that plastic
Can buy you anywhere these days?

In other words, how would it feel
To be more or less nobody,

But also more or less carefree?
That’s how a ghost must feel, it seems.

Yellowhammer

Scribble lark, writing lark,

Eggs covered in marks,

Little bird, pretty bird,

Hunted by hawks, singing

A little bit of bread

And no cheese, while living

Mostly on seeds. Dreaming

One ordinary night,

A person woke thinking,

For no reason, your name,

And that led to thinking

Of your eggs scrawled with marks,

Your bright irrelevance,

And your frailty, your song.

Names are constellations,

Leading only to names,

What’s not in worlds or stars

Maps like bird songs but not,

But not, but not, but not.

There was no creation

Until constellations

Gave birds’ eggs metaphors,

Birds’ songs words, a little

Bit of bread from those seeds.

Too Much to Hunt

How did it ever
Get to be so much?
It always was

As much nothing much,
The uncountable
Unaccountable,

But you kept focused
On your small circle,
A good animal,

Despite words in mind.
Stories shut it out,
The massive counting,

The sheer statistics.
Is that what they’re for?
Not to remember,

But your soft blinders.
Hawks that hood yourselves,
You perch, calm, alert,

So long as story
Cloaks your deep vision
Of what you could hunt,

If you were still wild.
That’s not quite it, no.
You weren’t used to sight.

You never were wild
Like so much is wild.
You’ve become something

Else, a lensed being
That really should hide
From how much you know

Of the fallaway
World, the infinite
In flight in your sight.