Contra Septenaria

Caesar’s singing soldiers marched,
Chanting trochees at the front—

All their blood and gore—the Celts
Killed, the women raped, the burnt

Crops, the Rubicon—their own
Civil wars, their plagues, the last

Days of Rome’s Republic—Great
Caesar’s ghost is boasting still—

Veni, vidi, vici—mind
Marching down roads strewn with bones,

Well-formed phrases stomping thoughts
In the skulls that have survived

Warfare long enough to die
Hailing Caesar, hypnotized.

Seven Holes in Your Head

Count them. There are more of course,
All the pores. What counts as hole
Is arbitrary as what

Counts as whole, and we’re nothing
If not counts arbitrary.
But those seven matter more

To the value of your head
Than brains give them credit for.
If your eyes were at your waist,

If you were a gastropod
(A successful strategy,
More speciose than bipeds),

Or were armed with ear shoulders,
There’d be no science fiction
Movies about heads in jars,

Few neurons dedicated
For searching out soul windows
By recognizing faces.

It’s to the holes in your head,
Animal soul, we address
Our whole selves. Take this as read.

Exhaustive Taxonomy

There are so many, too many ways
To parse experience—for instance

Into things that will resolve themselves,
Things that might, things that won’t, things you must

Resolve yourself, things you can’t resolve,
Things that lie beyond resolution—

All one taxonomy actual
As any, but rarely considered

As such—the wound you feel and then feel
Heal itself, the shadow in the house,

The flash flood, the empty bank account,
The gradual aging of your flesh,

The cosmic background radiation
That will never show the face of God.

Make your own list. Or taxonomize
Your experiences differently.

There are off-the-shelf taxonomies
To choose from. Every practice and creed

Can offer you some. There’s so many,
You could place taxonomies themselves

Into their own parsed taxonomy,
But then life just gets too exhausting.

Unfortunate Universe

Nothing out there seems immune
To the love of gravity,

The one evenhanded love
Everywhere so everything

Knots and burns unevenly.
But let’s talk humanity,

Words of otherwise wordless
Human moments that we are,

In an otherwise wordless
World it would seem so far,

Humans caught up in your own
Unfortunate universe

Whose gravity is your need
For human deviousness,

Let’s not pretend it isn’t.
Only humans could read this,

With maybe human machines
As intermediaries,

So, if you know us, you know
Planning, negotiation,

Manipulation, handling—
All part of how you’ve survived

Thus far, loved enough or not,
Wise or not, well-fed or not.

Negotiating other
Humans is as gravity

To worded thinking. You must
Play out that hand. You must.

Satisfy Your Mind

If you don’t lay down your head,
You never will decide which
You felt like most. If you have,

You know what you had in mind.
Don’t let no one else tell you
How and why it was you felt

So undecided you looked
Down that line. There’s a torment
Between what a body wants

And the fragments of a mind.
Now your body’s got back up,
You’ll have to keep that in mind.

The sun will shine every day.
The sun does nothing but shine.
When it’s in your back door, fine.

When it’s not, remember how
Cold you were at 2:19,
Coldest your mind’s ever seen.