Repertoire

The robins sing at dawn,
And the old poet chants
By the open window

Because it’s Canada
In mid-July, the lake
Shining in the mountains,

Time for robins to sing
The trills that work for them,
The poet to recite

Words that work for no one
But ourselves, floating signs.
The world is listening,

Always listening, but
Only the shining world,
Nothing and no one else.

The world is listening
For small variations
That alter repertoire.

The Erosion of a Few

It’s not a plot device
For everyone, childhood
As origin story.

Weirdly, when the damage
Is fully visible,
Literal, physical,

It seems less important.
Suddenly, the psyche
Was shaped by other things.

People like the hidden
Traumatic backstory
That they can ferret out

The way they winkle clues
From favorite fictions.
No one wants to see scars

So large an imbecile
Could trace each cicatrice.
They want to prove themselves

Insightful detectives.
It rather spoils the fun
To erode in plain view.

Lyraposematic

Here we are just signaling,
Signaling away. We are
Just signaling, signaling

You away. You can go now
While we, still signaling, stay.
Here the signs are signaling

Now, the poet’s gone away.
Here we remain signaling,
Pretending nothing to say,

Just a little signaling
In our insignificant
Way. That’s not our eye on us—

That eye’s you, that’s what you mean,
Signaling away our scene.

Endlessly Generating Novelty

Time to get up and create
The next set of dilemmas
To solve that create the next

Set of dilemmas to solve.
Open out at the short end,
Opening on openings,

Come on there, algorithm,
Let’s get going. Throw that door
Wide open that never shuts,

That lets the blowing, howling
Wind of the empty next
Rush at us, open-ended

Problem solvers that we are,
Generating more problems.

And the Counting’s Part of It

Beyond whatever boundaries
You construe between things and you
And between you and other things,

Way too many events occur—
You might as well count every wave
You can see out the ship’s window.

Within whatever boundaries
You construe between you and things
And between other things and you,

The same. It’s just too much, too much.
You can pretend to count it all
And give it a fair estimate,

But that’s just how you learn it’s just
Too much, everything happening.

Turtle Eats a Rotten Strawberry

Disgust is a moving target,

Wrote Robert Sapolsky. It’s true.

Everything’s a moving target,

However. Some of us are just

Slower. Truth’s a moving target.

Lagrange points are moving targets.

This effort to be meaningful

By rearranging shells of words

In slightly surprising phrases

Is a moving, if lumbering

Little target, this endangered

Turtle of lyric rhetoric.

Who knew turtles could run? Who knew

Words drool moldy fruit to have fun?

Dragon’s Brain Perfume

Watch out or we’ll sublimate,
Solid one sec, air the next.
You may be mostly liquid,

But we’re scent or silicon,
Sturdy until vaporized.
Once we’re air, we don’t come back,

No matter what equations
Balance energetically.
We advance by making waves,

Simultaneous attacks,
Copies all over the place.
Some of us are still out there.

Chopped up and burned for perfume
Until not a copy’s left,
You may believe we’ve vanished,

And often you’ll be correct.
Then someone opens a cave,
And out smokes the dragon breath.