Small Hours of the Suburbs Before the War

The urge to preserve and to cast away
Seem related somehow in human brains,
There with the urge to burn down and conserve.

Does it necessarily have to be
Anything to do with opposition,
Or binaries, or built-in positions?

Maybe it is just a case of the brain
Knowing something that the self does not know,
Like a neighbor who is in on something

About the nature of the neighborhood
You are not and likely never will be,
Although it is a place you never leave.

The lights on in the bedrooms every night
Glow to show dark is close to taking flight.

The Psalmist’s Archives

What is ambition, exactly, in the body
Of an aspiring, just-now beginning poet?

Awards? Campus status? A cushy position?
Being welcomed by the embraces of others

Who embody cultural prestige as poets?
Not much of that to spread around, really, is there?

Close to the neighborhood of spooky, quantum glands,
Wherever self and soul are thought to lie these days,

Perhaps the cherished, hidden ambition remains
To be one of the great poets, major poets,

Familiar name within some familiar canon,
A blurry magnitude of famous quotations.

Or maybe you’re dreaming of changing things
With poems that do good. Forgive yourself all your hymns.

Autobiography of Meme-X

October 1962,

Along with all the other stuff

Carrying on with the Cold War—

Space race, Cuban missile crisis—

Engelbart conceptualized

A sort of mechanized private

File and library, a future device

To augment human intellect

For which he coined the name, meme-x,

Suggesting we would need to use

Its own power as tool to control

Its social impact. Failed at that,

And here we are with whoever

Was punished, whoever got rich.

Thirteen-Character Verse

What next, pocket poem?
Can you make yourself
Fit for a napkin?
One-line equation?

That’s the elegance
Your maker wanted,
Mathematical,
But shifty, bal-peen

Hammer in velvet.
Four, five characters
Crammed per tongue-tied line,
Concrete as highways,

Gorgeous as clear nights
Over deserts left
Far from city lights,
Showing the season,

Outlining the theme,
Incomplete without
The calligraphy,
Iconography. . . .

Astronaut, don’t leave.
Sun chews horizons,
Bleeding battlefields
Where no one can breathe.