Persistent Coexistence

Back where tomorrow
Began in twitching
Phase transitions, ice
And fever, it ends.

Young Earth

Adults often concern themselves with children,
Worrying they will learn too much too soon
About the disturbing world of adults.

Certainly, the young of many species,
Including humans, are at risk of harm
From adults, whether familiar or strange.

But do those risks lie really in learning?
Any innocence made of ignorance
Is a source of vulnerability.

How peculiar that human grownups want
Their young to not understand them too soon.
It’s not only that knowledge is power—

The knowledges themselves are competing
For skull island, survival of the first.

Loss as Consolidation

Forgetting and relearning
Apparently solves something
For both humans and machines.

Presumably, the machines
Do not find themselves terrified
By the forgetting prequel

Before the relearning stage
That advances the ratchet
For more flexible knowing.

A human lost for a name,
For familiar directions,
Will likely start panicking,

Although the model relearns
By mimicking those mistakes.

The Company of Sticks

Sickness, like everything, is wavy.
Wavular. Wavily washing you
Under the waves. The writers you like

For writing with nothing much at all,
A few books, remembered accolades,
Or no accolades, a hut, a cell,

You know they’re mostly mythology,
But you consider what it was like
For Stonehouse when he was holed up sick,

No one to tend his garden for him
While he recovered, maybe tending
The hearth where he nursed his smoky sticks.

Or Irina Ratushinskaya,
When she etched her prison poems in soap
With burnt matchsticks, what was that like, sick?

Writing through sickness is a mercy.
It does nothing to ease being sick,
But it’s company, under the waves.

Picket Fence

Are you one of those
Who tend to assume
The ghosts you knew once,
Unseen for decades,
Are probably dead?

They probably aren’t,
Not most of them. Most
Of them are doubly
Extant—memories
Living in your head,

Lives still going on
Somewhere far away.
Most of them you won’t
Meet again, not in
Your life, ghost to them.

A few you locate
Who you knew as kids—
Scott in Columbus,
Colleen in Sussex.
Maybe an obit.

But you don’t contact
Any of them, not
By text or seance.
You’ll be going soon.
Let them contact you.