The Cooperative

We build them, they blow them up.

They build them, we blow them up.

Coordination pitted

Against coordination

Is competition, is war.

The teams are fighting again

Over the ancient rivers.

Cooperation is all

About building bridges. We

Build them, they blow them up. They

Build them, we blow them up, says

One officer. Attrition,

All the media report,

It’s a war of attrition

This war of competition,

Of coordination, of

Cooperation. It takes

So much love to live like this,

So much love and trust to fight.

We build them, they blow them up.

They build them, we blow them up.

Last Earth First

It’s not that all the young idealists
Transform into old conservatives.
No matter how much change you wanted,

If you manage to live long enough
Your world will accumulate drifts of
Unexpected, unasked-for changes.

The day will come when you find yourself
The revolutionary agent
Of an ideal that never arrived,

As well as the truculent old grunt
Resisting the actual changes
You find wrecking the tidy garden

You tend to try to console yourself
For your failure to renew the world.

Have You, or Someone You Know, Recently Passed Away?

You think you may have noticed
A pattern—if you have to
Rise early for some reason,

Weirdly, you sleep well all night.
If you have the luxury
Of sleeping late as you like,

There you are, awake at 4,
In your lamp-lit reading chair.
We see you there. We’re always

Up wolf and coyote hours,
Watching stars and listening
For howls. Some mornings you’re there.

Your pattern, we’re not sure of.
We’ll nod sagely in assent,
However, since you’re so pleased

At having discovered it.
We think we may have noticed
A pattern to our own rest,

But we’re not as pleased with it.
We seem built to undo us
Regarding the rest of us.

Long Well

Down at the bottom of night’s long well,
The moon set an inlaid pearl button
Behind guitar strings of power lines.

This was just metaphorical fact
Of given embodied perspective.
Was it worth noting? That’s up to you.

It can’t mean if you never note it,
Means nothing if you never exist.
Nothing’s too trivial to exist.

And the Love

apart from “and” and “the,” is “love”

Three small words,

Of many

In English,

One joining,

One pointing

Exactly,

One, well, what?

Not enough

Says too much.

The Lone Proton

Without an electron,
One hydrogen ion
Drives or gets driven through

Much of the chemistry
That people call nature,
Organic, living, life.

We’ll confess to fondness
For imagining this
Pathetic fallacy,

This anthropomorphized
View of mere hydrogen
Stripped of electron,

Down to its last proton,
However fanciful,
As fully meaningful.

Frankly, life and nature,
And their related terms
In many languages,

Are anthropomorphic
Projections, by and large,
Inventions of humans.

Meaning is as meaning
Finds. At its most basic,
Is it not rewarding,

Those hordes of lone protons,
Pulsing through membranes,
As severely reduced,

Uncoordinated,
And simple as hermits,
Envisioned as basis

For the complexities
That, eventually,
Led to making meaning?