Anchor Escapement

One value to the lost time
Of obsessive daydreaming
And foolish fantasizing

Lies in how lies counterweight
Those other lies of terror.
When you realize, a bit late,

You may be in for something
Dreadful or difficult soon
With no chance to solve it now,

A plunge in mood is countered
By a little fantasy.
The more orderly persons

Come with anchor escapements
To steady that pendulum,
But if your escapism

Lacks an anchor, don’t despair.
Or do. Do despair. Then smile
At gold dust motes in the air.

You Don’t Need to Think So Much

Apparently, brains
Are so expensive,
The least reduction

In their benefits
Leads straight to pell-mell
Shrinkage in volume.

The latest reports
Have narrowed the dates
During which brains shrunk—

From fifty thousand
Or thirty thousand
Years before present

To just three thousand
Years of loss. If true,
Maybe we’re to blame,

In our written forms
At least—Axial
Age literacy,

Documentation,
Gutted brains. Plato
Got Socrates right

In that case—reading
Eats at memory.
As the prodigious

Recitatives of
Orality shrank
In value, so did

The acreage up
For occupation
Furrowing your skulls.

Don’t worry. As long
As we’re here, linking
Each to everyone,

Groups can think as one.
As long as that’s true—
Never mind. Worry.

It Is Said

Never trust any text
That starts with those three words.

The Ten Thousand Poems of Lu You

They probably rounded up

From nine thousand and something,

Given the conventional

Use of the phrase denoting

The sum of diversity

As all the ten thousand things.

It makes a nice target, though.

Could you write ten thousand things

You’d have the cheek to call poems?

What would you do after that?

Retire? One problem with life,

One among ten thousand things,

Is that there’s no stopping point,

Only death in retrospect.

To write means to keep writing.

Pigs and Rats

Meanwhile, extinction
Isn’t looming, not
For the pigs and rats.

On multiple
Continents, feral
Hogs and urban rats

Are doing fine, thanks.
Smart generalists,
Opportunistic

Mammals tolerant
Of concrete highways
And happy to feed

On what humans leave,
Good for them. Golden
Ages aren’t always

Diverse at the time.
Flightless terror birds
And gigantic sharks

Had turns in the wake
Of the Cretaceous.
A future Eden

Is being seeded
With all the litter
And litters of rats,

Humans and feral
Sidekicks such as swine
In these, best of times.

A Wave in the River of Souls

As you face whatever desperation

Is immediate and your own, disease

Or weakness, any dangerous way home,

Take a moment to contemplate the scale

Of individual humans thinking

Their ways simultaneously through life.

There are literally, literally

Billions on billions of human bodies,

Billion elderly, billion children,

More billions young and middle-aged adults,

All breathing, pulsing, hungry, and worried

About something, something right now, thinking

About what they should do, billions of them

And a great many billions before them,

And more billions likely after them, too,

Every one of them with some kind of brain,

Billions on billions more synapses,

Firing and exchanging information,

Right now, right now as you are among them,

Perhaps frantic, perhaps feeling alone,

A handful of thoughts trying to get home.

Spring Prospects

Mountains broken open,
Rivers shriveled and drained—
Now when the nation breaks

What remains? That comfort,
However bittersweet,
In eternal nature

Is gone. There’s nothing much
Matters to people now
That isn’t on the brink

Of some catastrophe.
The spin. You can’t wreck that.
Spin. Days and nights remain.